DavR

Doesn't sound notably different to any of the other methods I've tried (and failed) tbh. The thing that really made a difference for me was creating the profile in Audit mode, none of the others I made worked including sysprep alone.

Oh really? Can't say I've had that problem. I've got Start Pages etc defined in my Group Policy which seems to overcome that at least.

Clutching at straws, but has ANYONE managed to get a mandatory profile that will work with Microsoft Edge? And if so, how? After a lot of false starts, I finally got a working-ish mandatory profile by following the James Rankin guide linked earlier in this thread. The only thing that won't work is Edge, which does the classic open then close again. None of the advertised solutions out there have fixed it for me. I'm at the stage now of testing our Student user with local profile only - so annoying as Edge is the only sticking point! I can't believe I'm having to choose between having the default browser working, or dumping mandatory profiles.

Not roaming AppData, still in local. User profiles aren't supposed to copy the AppData\Local folders, but I found that if I added mandatoryprofile.V6\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Local State to my mandatory profile on the server, it did copy those folders down with the rest of the profile. Bit of a dirty fix, but as I only needed this for one student mandatory profile (staff can work it out themselves), I'm inclined to let it be.

Just a +1 to say that we had this problem with Chrome under Windows 10 as well. I tried all I've seen here with Preference and First Run files, but we were stubbornly still getting "Welcome to Chrome" from chrome://welcome-win10/ screen under mandatory profiles. The key file for us seems to be AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Local State. I copied this from a working machine after first run and dropped this into our mandatory profile and, touch wood, this seems to be working for us. Needs more testing tomorrow though! The only other option that worked for us is to go ahead and make Google Chrome your default browser, which I kinda resent having to do just to resolve a Welcome screen. I'm trying to give our kids open choice over which browser to use, not just immediately go for Chrome.

We buy them in packs of ten from Promethean - still comes out at a tenner a go, but a third of the price of buying singles. - - - Updated - - - The power supplies? No, I've still got a couple of you need some.

Sadly we still need the pens - we've only replaced the first batch out of our Activboard stock.

I must admit I haven't really considered long term options for Veeam / WMware as the annual licensing has been fairly small, but definitely something to consider when planning next year's budgets. Microsoft Licensing I already have on a three year deal, but invoiced annually, it's the way to go to avoid the constant hikes. Although whether that will fall off a cliff at the end of three years I don't know!

It's something to think about, long term licensing deals are better value, especially in the current climate of massive hikes because "something something exchange rate something something brexit". Are you paying Veeam up front or entering into five year contracts with annual payments? The latter is a no-brainer, but the former is always a bit trickier when the budget runs in single years.

We're not on the "for education" license, I'm not sure whether there is a downgrade path to Education or Essentials scheme from our current license? I will pose the question to my licensing supplier. We got our Veeam in 2014 I think, I don't know whether the Education or Essentials programs were available then, or whether the company who installed this system didn't do their homework...

Replacing a batch of boards this summer, and one of the things I've salvaged from the scrap is a handful of power adapters for ActivBoard 1/2 models. They're the ones that look like this: They used to retail at about £30 a piece on the Promethean spares site, but looking around to find that picture, it looks like they've stopped making replacements now! Free, buyer pays postage or pickup North London.

Probably no-one out there still using AB1s, but I thought I'd offer these as they're really useful and I've never seen them on sale anywhere. These little cables will allow you to use an AB1 on USB and the power injector, which saves maintaining workstations with serial ports. This replaces the serial only cable most of these were fitted with. Flat black end attaches to the board electronics, then USB and power feed in the other end. Free, buyer pays postage or pickup North London. I've got three of them.

Interesting... I'm guessing we probably can't downgrade to Essentials, we are on full B&R - again, so many variations of the same product!

Brilliant @psumner1992, this looks to be exactly what we want to do, thank you. If it can be done purely through paperwork and a change of the license file, then that's all the better! The price you have of £159 per annum - how many CPUs are you licensing? Going on the maintenance being 1/5 of purchase, I get about £142 per CPU working from the list price of £712 per CPU. Either way it's going to be better than the £255 per CPU we're being quoted for Enterprise. I need to confirm it with my third line team who notionally support our backups, but looks like a no-brainer to go ahead with downgrade.

Reinforcing all my points there @m25man - the long term costs on this are going up aggressively, and I can't see a time when I'm going to need the granular features. We don't hold any important data in local SQL, my AD is small enough to rebuild from scratch if needs be, and we've never had Exchange on our virtualised environment. Definitely supports my theory that Standard is the more appropriate version for our use. We're a primary running a simple system, An incremental backup with VM and file level restores is really all we need.

Yeah, all sounds very neat, but before reading the spec sheets I'd never even considered those features existing, let alone run into a situation where I needed them. I will definitely look at downgrading.

Oh, such as? Looking at the Standard v Enterprise comparisons, I didn't see anything we might need. Exchange for us is off site, and I don't need any fancy SQL business, or self service restore.

We're up to 9.0 at the moment, although I see 9.5 is available, and I'd certainly go to that and get my money's worth before closing any contract. I think we might have upgraded to 9 from 8 after paying for our last support contract, to get the value, although what actually happened was our backups borked for a few months. Essential sounds like it might be worth looking at also, thanks for the tip.

Hmm, looks like we're on an Enterprise license, which seems a little excessive. I'll have to ask my support company why that is (that's another sticking point, it's them that would be picking things up if it went wrong, not me). So we're B&R Enterprise 9 with 4 sockets over 2 hosts. I'm being quoted £255 per socket, I don't think I'm being given a bad deal as such from my licensing supplier, more a case of it being an expensive service full stop! I wonder if downgrading from Enterprise to Standard is possible. That would really reduce my support contract costs!

We're currently using Veeam Backup & Replication to do our VM backups, and I can't complain about the product, it's working fairly reliably all told. I have however just received a quote for our maintenance renewal for the year, and it came as a bit of a shock. For a 4 x CPU setup, we're being quoted over £1000 this year, which is up more than 25% on last year! That much on a contract I don't recall us calling on in the last year is starting to look a bit of a luxury at the moment. So that begs the question, can we do without it? As I understand it the software won't stop working if I don't renew, we just don't get access to upgrades, which I can probably live with. My concen is though, will this mean we'll get no support whatsoever when/if something goes wrong? I will pay up if I have to, but a 25% hike in one year does feel like someone is taking the mickey a bit. Not a fan of the maintenance contract service model - either sell me your product outright, or be upfront and say it's an annual fee or it stops working... Opinions sought!

I've always bought the JETech compatible ones from Amazon. They're not original, but Apple certified, £6 for 2 - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B015V7XB5M/ Problem with the Poundland ones is that they're not up to sync, they just charge, which is an issue for us (although may not be for you).

Hi all, We've got interactive displays coming in (at last!) in some classrooms this summer. If anyone is interested, that means we've got eight Promethean Activboards going free: 4 x Activboard 1 2 x Activboard 2 2 x Activboard 3 (with stands) Full working order as far as I know. Free for collection, North London.

When preparing my custom Start Menu, I removed ALL pinned tiles, so I got to a Start Menu that was just the Program list. Then I pinned a few tiles to get Programs + 3 tiles wide.

I've had that Start Menu layout work and not work for the same test user, never did pin it down. Mine is Programs list on the left plus 3 tiles wide on the right, and for a while there the 3 tiles wouldn't show! I've left it alone though, and am just not relying on the tiles section to work (I didn't really want any tiles, but you have to have them for the XML to work).

I haven't found 1703 that bad, but I haven't done enough with previous versions to judge it by. Apart from the lock screen thing (which is very annoying, but I'll cope), all the things that are broken for me are also known to be broken in 1607 as well.... I'm just alarmed at how many things are broken out of the box. It's like Microsoft are not only not testing properly, but then they're also not responding when bugs are reported.