DavR

I don't suppose anyone has come across a way to force screenshots and videos taken using the Camera app to store on Google Driver, rather than local storage? I'm a little wary of using the erase all local user data setting if it's also going to lose this data.

I've always done fresh installs, even on a workstation, that way you can be confident it's a good clean start. If you upgrade in place, any bugs or niggles in the old setup roll forward into the new. Which then develops it's own eccentricities on top....

I've just had this reported to me today, first time since we got the devices. Initially I had the erase all local user data setting turned on, but disabled it a while back, I think because we were starting to use apps on them, which would mean a fresh download each time. Perhaps I'll need to re-enable this setting, and they'll have to put up with the re-downloading. I'll have to test the performance impact, but if it's either that or running out of space repeatedly....

Does anyone know if that registry entry has made it into an update ADMX yet? The above link suggests it is being formalised as a group policy option, but I can't see any updated ADMX files to download for Windows 10 (we're on 20H2). We've found that this has become an issue for us just with the October update, so we are about to deploy this reg key, with P&P policy restrictions as mitigations.

@Koldov, reading this thread again today (with less of an air of panic than I had yesterday!) it does look like you're suffering quite a specific printing mishap with this latest CU. I would agree that it looks like the October CU on workstations, interacting mainly with your Kyocera drivers, that is causing your new weird behaviour. I don't suppose there's any alternative drivers for these devices you can use? Our experience does seem to be driver specific also, I guess depending on how certain drivers interact with the updated print spooler. On my test VM that is updated to October CU, I can make a new printer connection using the HP Universal Driver, for instance, but cannot make a new connection with our Ricoh drivers, it just errors out with "Operation Failed 0x0000139f". This is despite the fact that all necessary drivers are already installed. Luckily, at least for us, all existing connections continue to print OK. I would experiment with different drivers for your Kyoceras as a first option, see if you can find anything that plays nicely with the latest updates.

This seems to have struck us too. We were getting away with just the Point & Print group policy settings through September, but now that we've had the October CU, we can't add the photocopiers via GP to machines the user hasn't logged on to before. If I use the RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrators hack, it starts working again. I think the muted response to this is because a lot of people have already addressed it (either using the reg hack or otherwise) or it's only hitting some print drivers (this one only seems to be hitting Ricoh drivers for us, the HP Universal is fine). Another variable for us is that it only seems to be new logons to new computers - if the user already had their profile cached on a machine pre-update, then it didn't cause them any issues. So given that, by this point in the year, that's most users for us, it's probably masking the problem a certain amount.

I am very happy to say that we're finally junking our Dell Latitude E5530 laptops. They've been an education in laptop repair, but my gosh, they have also been a drain of time and resources! For anyone else still maintaining this badly designed unit, I have a set of brand new replacement hinges going spare, still in the packet. Free to a good home. If anyone needs other parts, I may be able to salvage some before the scrap man comes at half term, just ask.

I'm finding similar getting parts for our Lenovo units. Warranty is covering most things, but broken screens etc I've had to source myself coming in at over half the original cost of the unit. It's tempting to just replace with new, but, given we're maintaining what are currently matching classroom sets, I'm loathe to start mixing and matching. I've found Dell to be more reliable, and when they're not, their parts are a lot more reasonably priced.

That's interesting! I've not tried that fix before. What models are these, out of interest?

Often this bug in the ADMX template is because they've only provided ADML files for the En-US versions, not En-GB. If you find the corresponding Google ADML files in the En-US folder in your template store, and copy them to En-GB, that could fix the issue with displaying the policies. Dunno about the actual end user problem, that's a separate issue I think.

So many times this. I regularly get calls from staff looking for help to get X to do Y, when actually, that's not remotely the best way of doing it. Always start from "What are you trying to achieve" and usually you can come up with a far more appropriate solution.

Discussed on another thread specifically about the Lenovo 300e - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/222422-lenovo-300e-2nd-gen-mtk-spectacular-failure-rate.html The error message for storage chip is "0x26 EC software sync error updating EC".

I think at that stage it's either the mainboard or the storage that is toast tbh. If you press tab at the ChromeOS is missing or damaged screen (I think) it should give you the actual error message to help diagnose. Sadly, as wonderful as these cheap devices are, they are horribly unrepairable when they go wrong. I always go for three year warranties as a minimum.

We're doing this same exercise right now, but not through Google Classroom. The video goes up (unlisted) on our school's YouTube channel and a link is emailed home. This might be more work for whoever is in charge of the YouTube channel, but it's far preferable than shooting holes in your GC security.

What is your usage case where parents would need their child's login details? Is this in school, for a web-based service, or issuing to parents on behalf of a child? For EYFS to Y6 we issued all of our parents with their child's Google Classroom logins for remote learning, on the basis that they would be managing this on the child's behalf. As that era is passing, we are potentially looking at EYFS using GC as a method of sending things home, so child and parent would log on together. As and when we have older children still going into isolation, we have been handing out their GC logins to parents as necessary. I'm not sure there's really anything the parent is going to see that they shouldn't.

RM702 fits in quite nicely with the BENQ bus theme! I'll get my anorak....

It's tempting Michael! I'm going to pursue this with Promethean for now, as they don't deserve to get away with it, but I may come back to you....

I've definitely found that different GPUs output HDMI to a different "power" almost. We've got one cheapo screen that will only run reliably if it's run off a discrete graphics card, for instance, so I'm not surprised you're getting different results with different laptop models.

We've recently gone back to Promethean, mainly so that we could keep using the ActivInspire software. Before that though, we were using iiYama Prolite 65s without much problem. I'm fairly sure these have a whiteboard and annotation built in, and are about the same price point. Although I would probably say we had similar levels of HDMI issues with both vendors. Basic passive HDMI just isn't very good over distance, or going through connectors/wall boxes.

Did anyone make the jump to 2.22? We went from 2.19 to 2.22 as we were getting quite a lot of crashes, the problems don't seem to have been as chronic as they were in 2.21, but from what I've been hearing back today, they've not been resolved either

It's weird that you're not seeing the Camera app - we're using 20H2 and it's there for us. I'm using the Windows 10 20H2 ISO from the VLSC, with certain inbuilt apps de-provisioned, could you perhaps have accidentally de-provisioned this while preparing your build? It could be there, but just need registering into the user profile. If it's available at all, you should see it under C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsCamera_2018.826.98.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe (or some variation thereof). If it is there, you can just write a login script to register the app in the profile. I found I had to do that with quite a few apps this upgrade, for some reason.

Thanks for this tip. I can't find anything that mentions this is an issue for Outlook, or anywhere under Exploit Protection that says that it's running any protections on Outlook.exe, but you never know! I've stuck the Known Issue Rollback fix into our GPOs, I'll see if that offers any improvement.

All up to date with the latest updates, WSUS is working as expected. Interesting theory about printer and/or graphics drivers, this issue has only come about since we came back in September, but it's hard to divine whether that's due to our recent update to 20H2, or the mentioned bug in the latest CU. Could conceivably be a driver that doesn't play nicely with 20H2, but I've no indications yet. Something to bear in mind though.

We use Egress switch encrypted email platform. It basically puts the message on a secure platform, and then only someone with an Egress account linked to the email you send out can access it. You can get a free account to receive messages, but need a paid account if you're going to send any real volume through the system. It integrates with Outlook, although Outlook does disable the plugin sometimes with is an irritation. We got given about 10 paid accounts through LGfL, so I can't comment on pricing, but it seems to do the job.

Could the difference be between devices on the 2.4Gz band and those using 5Ghz? Depending on relative age of devices, your wifi could be just fine on one band, and suffering interference on the other.