DavR

We don't have the new reports in ours yet. I think we'll be OK on the storage side (currently all our SharePoint + OneDrive = about 1TB!) although I will look at storage quotas. Damn shame about A1 Plus retiring though, I fought Microsoft support for months to get that added to our tenant. Does anyone know where that leaves OVS customers? We've got a couple of years left to run on ours. IIRC, you used to be able to ask your reseller to add your Office Pro Plus licenses to your tenant, which could be used in a similar way to the A1 Plus, but were a bit more limited. I'm hoping A1 + Office Pro Plus licensing can replace A1 Plus for us, with no extra purchase necessary.

When the August update didn't resolve this problem for us, I did a little hunting online, and have found a solution that fixed this for us. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1162419/shortcut-icon-blank-when-ico-file-is-located-on-a The group policy setting fixed all the trouble we were having with blank icons. I don't know why the July update caused this problem for us, as the behaviour doesn't seem to be specific to that update, but either way this seems to have fixed it.

My daily driver at home is a self-build from June 2012, so beat you by a few months It's had SSD and RAM upgrades, the case fans have been replaced twice, and occasionally it scares the bejesus out of me and won't start after maintenance, but otherwise it's still going strong. When I get some time, I will research my next box. I'm thinking something minimal and quiet like an NUC.

We had the last but one of our Promethean ActivBoard 2's decommissioned last week, so it's really about time I got rid of my ActivPen 3 stock! https://www.amazon.com/ACTIVPEN3-1-Promethean-Activpen-3/dp/B003B4VGC8 This is the grey and orange Promethean pen for the ActivBoard 1 and 2. These are no longer manufactured. £10 + p&p each for new pens, second hand ones available just for cost of postage. Schools only please, no third parties or resellers.

We have 25 boxed, brand new, Dell keyboard and mouse sets that are surplus to requirements. Model number is KM5221W, black, UK QWERTY - https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-pro-wireless-keyboard-and-mouse-km5221w-uk-qwerty/apd/580-ajru/pc-accessories Looking for £20 each + pnp, or happy to do a deal on bulk sales. Edit - I should also say, for bulk sales, collection also available, North London.

Never concede an empty storage space, as someone will very quickly fill it!

I've got one Promethean board I've been keeping for spares. It's been there so long now, though, that it's been buried by wood offcuts our site manager is keeping for a rainy day. I'll throw it away one day, when a chance comes to fish it out. Power and VGA cables, I've got one heaped Gratnells box of each in my office, and an overflow box in my store room. I should have a clear out, really, the overflow at least I could scrap. Most other cables get a box each. I've stopped keeping new power leads unless they're something special. Sad to say, a lot of the time, as they arrive, they go straight in the WEEE box.

It may not be relevant to the MSI installers, but we're using the exe version of VLC in a script, and my command line is below. We had to add /L=1033 to specify language. "vlc-3.0.11-win64.exe" /L=1033 /S

Sounds about right! My first experience of IWB at all was in my first job c. 2003 - we had one whiteboard, in a four form entry secondary school. It was on wheels and got used as a portable projection screen occasionally. No-one ever plugged the interactive element in.

We'll be replacing our last 1st Gen Promethean ActivBoard next week - can anyone remember when these came out? I can remember doing a first big install of ActivBoards in a school about 2004/5, but I think even then we may already have been on 2nd Gen boards....

No, I must admit I've not even seen much discussed online about it either. As it's only a cosmetic issue for us, and we're going into the holidays, I've left it alone and am hoping it gets a fix in the August update.

I've just been troubleshooting this same thing. We have redirected desktops, and any shortcuts on the redirected desktop which point to URLs are appearing as white, no icon, despite the fact we have a custom icon set. They still work, though. Just verified this by removing KB5028166 from one machine, desktop icons are perfect again now.

Hi all, We're upgrading some workstations over the summer, and I thought I'd put the feelers out to see if anyone wants the decommissioned ones? We'll have 24 x Dell OptiPlex 3020 SFF workstations, Core i3-4130 with 4GB RAM (one Core i5, for some reason) going spare. They're 2014 vintage, but still work OK. They've initially came with 3.5in HDD, have been adapted to take 2.5in SSD. Drives not included, but open to discussion. For collection, North London. Free, or donation to the school PTA. Thanks!

I think you'd be in the clear with blocking stuff like Games categories, this is as you say, a behaviour management decision. In terms of overblocking, it doesn't impede children or adults' ability to reach genuine educational content. Have you had a look at the , in the link above? They give the example of the Sex Ed curriculum, where children may start googling anatomical terms. You want that child to be able to access information on those terms, but, you want to block potentially explicit results. Overblocking in this case would be to block ALL content relating to anatomical terms, impeding the child's ability to access information relevant to the curriculum. Another one perhaps would be WW2 history. You want children to access informational content on WW2, it's causes and after effects, but, you don't want them to access harmful and current far right material. Overblocking would be to block all and every mention of fascism. How far you go varies on the age range, of course.

For info, this doesn't come into force until September 2023. No harm in being prepared though, of course! Interesting that those cybersecurity standards sound very familiar to the ones some of our colleagues consulted with the DfE on. I wonder if they're the same ones?

At $100 a month, I'd be inclined to just drop the Twitter feed from our website design. Our socials really aren't that important.

I would treat Chromebooks as an entirely different ecosystem, with it's own management, and pros and cons. They don't really integrate into an existing Windows network at all, much the same as iPads, they're just web access devices. File shares, printing, external hardware, all are VERY limited on Chromebooks. If it were me, I'd try and avoid introducing just one or two Chromebooks, and try and keep the staff on Windows laptops. The real power of Chromebooks for us has been being able to get more devices into the hands of children relatively cheaply, but it does come with the overhead of having that other ecosystem to manage.

We had the same thing with the Twitter feed on our website, it's due to a change made at Twitter's end that severely limits the abilities of the free tier apps that most of these integrations run on. Our guy reckons we'll need the paid for version of Smash Balloon. For the time being though, we just dropped it off our front page design while we try and work this out.

Nosing around in our policies, I've also just found the following fix under user settings. Under %localappdata%\Adobe\OOBE, create a file called com.adobe.acc.default.prefs with content; false This should correspond to the launch at login setting in the Adobe CC application itself. We've deployed this file from a server share to users using GP Prefs files. There's also a couple of other ones around autoupdate, but I'm not convinced how effective those are.

We've done this by deleting the below registry key; HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Adobe Creative Cloud I think that's all we did, it's a while back now. You may also want to check under SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and see if there's anything under there that needs killing off too.

Ah, OK. I haven't tried connecting a Chromebook to an old-style ActivBoard, although Promethean seem to suggest it would work. I've not tried Classflow myself, we stuck with desktops and regular ActivInspire. It's free to create a Classflow account though, so I'd try it and see if it suits your needs - https://classflow.com/en-gb/

That is correct, you cannot run ActivInspire on a Chromebook. You can run a free web-based alternative called Promethean Classflow, which I think allows you to import and convert your old flipcharts, but doesn't work with them natively. Are you planning to run those Chromebooks connected to flat panel screens in classrooms? Depending on the kit available, you might find it easier to use the built-in web browser and presentation apps on the screens and dispense with the Chromebooks...

Fair enough, I can see those Stones not having TPM. I was pleasantly surprised to find our Dell desktops going back to 2014 having them though.

We use these in a couple of scenarios, and found they struggle to power an AP and a phone. We use them now to split a port between a PoE device and a few other regular LAN connections. The specs say they'll do either one Class 3, or, two Class 1/2 devices (assuming an 802.3at power input). They'll do VLANs if you need them, although the interface is a little eccentric.

Apologies if this seems too obvious and you've already looked, but..... have you checked whether these machines might have TPM, but have it disabled in the BIOS? I found a couple of models in our inventory that I didn't expect to have TPM chips, did, in this way.