DavR

After various problems with newer versions, we hung on to ActivInspire 2.14 for quite a while. However, when we upgrade to 21H2, we had performance issues and had to upgrade to 2.24. Whereupon we also had the frequent crashing issue. I've got two teachers testing a fix for me at the moment, which is to delete all the temp files and ActivInspire profiles, as per this article. It's early days, but so far it's looking positive.

I'm planning to roll it out when reinstalling workstations over the summer break. From experience, the uninstall/reinstall of Office is too long a process through a traditional startup script, especially if you've got a lot of machines going at once.

Funnily enough, I went out to quote to replace our 6 year old Extreme/Aerohive solution this term. In the end, one supplier suggested that actually, for our fairly basic needs, we could probably just renew licensing for another three years, and add a few extra devices to plug the gaps, so I went with that. We're AP130s across the board, so we're AC but not WiFi6, and we've just bought some Atoms (mini APs) to plug the gaps. Time will only tell whether that was a good decision or not. I think we'll manage.

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but just wanted to drop by and say thanks - I've been bashing my head against a wall with our Office 2019 installer all day, until I found this thread. '' was the silver bullet for us (we're Eng International on our Win 10 ISO also), changed that and both download and install started working. What a palaver. What was so wrong with releasing a nice ISO? Or at least make source files downloadable and installable.

A 64GB drive is near useless on a Windows device IMO. We received a few with 64GB (Dell 3100) from the last of the DfE scheme, and they wouldn't even install our base image and program list. Definitely 256GB as a minimum.

The trolleys work pretty well for us here, although when I started they were in a pretty dire state. It's cost a lot of time and money to bring them round. We have a trolley of 15 or 30 devices in each year group (primary), which has the benefit that the year group (four class teachers, in our case) has a responsibility to look after their own devices. Ownership is key to getting things looked after. It also helps that I've spent the last 5+ years making sure that ALL devices are uniform, maintained, and available as much as possible. When people see that the technology has improved, and is working and maintained, they're more likely to respect and care for it. But it all boils down to the culture in your school, of course, and some people will always be careless, mindless, idiots (and that's just the adults). We've mostly moved towards Chromebooks in our trolleys, so management wise they're a lot simpler and a lot more reliable and available, as updates happen in the background. We have kept one trolley of Windows devices though, and what I've found works well on these is: Force shutdown when lid is closed Force Windows updates in the background, but disable reboot notifications so children don't see them Logging of last user, to help trace devices that inevitably wonder off What's also been helpful I've found is really strict cable management. Where the devices charge off the standard mains power bricks, these are locked down to the extent the only user accessible wires are the 20cm required to plug in to the laptop and charge. No more power bricks wandering off, and minimises cable tangle messes.

Yes it does. If it's third party sales then I feel a lot more comfortable ignoring it.

Yeah. The more I say it out loud, the more it feels like phishing. It's a very convincing email spoof though!

Just had a weird email from "Microsoft" with the heading "END OF SUPPORT NOTICE". Has anyone else ever had something like this? It's coming from what looks to be a legit Microsoft email address, and I can't immediately see their angle if it is a scam, but it just has a very weird vibe, and is very non-specific about which, of our Microsoft products, is reaching end of support. My current feeling is that this is phishing and I should ignore it, just wondering if anyone else has had an approach from M$ like this and it be legit.

Is there a reason you need to use the proprietary software? If this is just USB storage, I'd be inclined to do all of my formatting in the Windows Disk Management GUI, where the disk size and partitions will be very clear.

Blue background for staff, green for students, so that you can see at a glance who's on what. School logo "tastefully" in the centre of both. That's on our Windows network and our Google estate. I quite liked the idea of having the logo as a badge top right of the desktop, where it wouldn't clash with anything else, but I found that didn't work with all the different resolutions we had around the school.

I think the "delete marker file to cause reinstallation" behaviour you mention was never guaranteed. It will work on some applications, not on others, depending on the installer logic. You are calling an executable with that script, rather than calling an MSI. You'd be more likely to get "repair" behaviour if you called the MSI directly. If it were me though, I'd always / have always called the uninstaller first, then run a clean install.

Neverwhere CloudReady is working, so @Sanchez you may find that's an option. I guess I've got another batch of Chromebooks with Windows badges on. Thanks DfE, I guess....

Having the same problem as @Sanchez with putting Chrome OS Flex on the Dell 3190. Installs, but doesn't boot, or boots to a black screen. If I select the boot partition manually, I get the "Invalid image" error. UEFI on, Secure boot off, PTT off. They're listed as "minor issues expected" on the OS Flex compatibility page - https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11513094?hl=en These are the 64GB eMMC versions, which I'm really struggling to find a use for. The storage is too small to take my domain Windows build, it'll just about take my standalone build, but only leaving 7GB free space after, which will be gone in a few weeks. Really disappointing as I had plans for these as domain laptops. Might give Neverwhere a bash next!

I always do 1 PSU in the mains, 1 in the UPS, too. UPS failures have hit me harder than power failures, over the years. Spec on the rating of 1 PSU, but chances are, your PSU will never be drawing it's full capacity. If you have the opportunity, it would be good to run your server and observe how much power it's actually drawing - even at full pelt, my PSUs use a fraction of their rated power.

We haven't tried adding VPP credits, we've got the school credit card added to the account for when we need to make purchases.

I can tell you how NOT to do it.... a friend of the school did all of our site plans for our fire evacuation notices. They look very nice and professional stuck on the walls. When he moved on, he sent me the source files. They were done in Adobe Flash, guys. They're a Flash animation, each notice is a different slide, and I have no idea how to port that into something sensible

Another idea - is there a wall or desk nearby you can fit a permanent mount to, so the screen is literally bolted down?

I've always used Kensington when I've needed to lock things down, although perhaps a little expensive if all you're securing is a monitor. Is it a particularly expensive monitor, or just a vulnerable one? Most Kensington stuff relies on their branded locking slot of course, but you can buy glue on slots like this to attach a cable to - https://www.kensington.com/en-gb/p/products/security/lock-anchor-points-accessories/security-slot-adapter-kit-for-ultrabook/

Extreme Cloud IQ - i.e. what was Aerohive several rebrandings ago. Hoping to move to Merkai next financial year.

It's also not just YouTube, I was having the problem with Google Forms. As I understand it, the call for the website is being invoked by a DLL Google recognises as being part of Internet Explorer, even though the website is ultimately supposed to be delivered by whatever your default browser is. IE is a dead browser, and no longer recommended by many sites, Google included. So they may argue that this is by design, and it's Microsoft's fault for using bits of IE to call websites from Office in the first place. Ultimately though, when it's a simple reg fix to work round it, there's not really much point arguing who should be dealing with it. Fix it, and on to the next problem, IMO

Thanks for all this folks - I've just applied the ForceShellExecute fix here, and it's fixed the problem we were having launching certain web pages from Microsoft Excel 2016. I did a bit of testing along the way and can confirm that it should always be under the 9.0 registry key. This key did not exist for us, I had to create the whole path and the value.

A shame for this problem, but I see your reasoning. I wonder if there's a way you could make Google Drive or OneDrive open such a public link without prompting for credentials.

You could always put it through a complete wipe all content and reset through iTunes, if you've been locked out of those options in Settings app. If reassigned the device to the correct DEP server, you should then be able to re-enroll to Lightspeed, and you'll be back to where you started at least. That's based on my experience making similar mistakes in Meraki(!) and assuming the same general rules would work with other MDMs.

Have you got the option to remove the profile under Settings | General | Device Management? IIRC you can remove these profiles on non-DEP devices, but not on DEP.