AngryTechnician

I think you're referring to battery calibration? Try this.

Let's be honest, it's not just another browser. Firefox, Chrome, et al. are largely self-contained programs, but Internet Explorer is inextricably linked with a lot of shared system components. Such integration was part of the basis for the legal problems Microsoft have had with IE, which ultimately led to that sodding annoying EU Browser Choice update. But I digress. Just one example I read about today is that IE9 ships with updated versions of Direct2D and DirectWrite DLLs, which are used for things like hardware-accelerated page rendering. Any other program using functions such as these will need to be closed in order to avoid a reboot.

WSUS is basically a cache/approval system for the normal Automatic Updates system built in to Windows, which is used as the delivery system. Updates can be configured to apply automatically on a schedule just like they can be when you are not using WSUS. The user does not need to have installation rights. I have it set up so that the machines wake up during the night and apply updates then when no-one is using them. If you want them to install during the day you can configure it that way but updates requiring a reboot will either reboot automatically or nag the user to reboot manually, depending on how you configure it. And yes, those are the only two options; you can't just have it wait silently until the user logs off and then reboot.

The T&Cs of the site probably prohibit this. The Times, for example, clearly prohibits it on page 2 of their T&Cs.

Blimey, I've just realised I had the digger, the crane truck, and the lorry/fork lift. Must have cost my parents a sodding fortune!

May I ask who issued said warning? As GrumbleDook and levell3r have outlined already, they are giving out incorrect information.

There are a few products in the Microsoft System Center range such as Essentials or Configuration Manager that will do this in a single unified product, but I wouldn't call either of them particularly efficient when it comes to the server resources they consume. WSUS is free and is the industry standard for managing Windows Updates (the above MS products both use it under the hood). Combine that with something like Lansweeper or Spiceworks (both of which have very capable free versions) and you may well hit all your functional requirements without having to spend a penny or dedicate a lot of server resource. I have previously used Lansweeper and WSUS together, and currently use System Center Essentials. Both solutions worked well; I was drawn to SCE by the integration aspect but am actually considering moving away from it again as it has some irritating glitches at times and is pretty resource hungry.

I almost always use pre-built MSIs if they are available (often with MSTs to customise shortcuts and the like), unless I look at them in Orca and see that they've been created with a capture program. I hate capture programs. In my experience, they almost always pick up extraneous changes that are nothing to do with the program being installed, and most people using them don't have the knowledge required to work out what they can and can't drop (present company possibly excepted!). Some of the worst workstation problems I've ever dealt with have been down to badly captured MSIs screwing around with registry changes or system files that have nothing to do with them

In your onsite DNS, create a new Primary zone named mail.domain.org In this zone, create an A record with a blank name and the IP address that mail.domain.int uses. Once created, it will show as as having a name of (same as parent folder). That's it.

Do you actually want them redirected to mail.domain.int or would you be happy with mail.domain.org simply resolving to the same IP address as mail.domain.int? Also, are we talking HTTP webmail access or other services like POP3/IMAP?

Usual rubbish tech reporting. Original story is from NetworkWorld and misquotes some out-of-context figures. A Neowin staffer then basically lifted the entire article out of his RSS reader* without fact-checking or adding anything but his own opinions. Take a look at the full report. First, it has an 'Education' category, not 'Schools', so we're almost certainly looking at universities here too. Second, education may have scored worst on exposure window, but saying 'banking' did the best is slightly misleading since they separate it from the significantly worse-off 'financial services' category, which the layperson would naturally assume were the same thing. Third, take a look at page 5 for the average number of vulnerabilities. Education does quite well, while financial services are the second worst on there. Fourth, their methodology (page 11) is poorly explained. No demographics data to speak of, so we have no idea of the geographic location of the organisations checked. They do say that only about 400 organisations in total were checked, but there's no breakdown of the number of organisations in each category. If we assume an equal spread across their categories, we could be looking at only 40 education establishments. Hardly a representative sample, is it? *How do I know this? The author left the ?source=nww_rss query parameter in the link he posted.

You know you can just stay on Schools Agreement, right? Or have you been talking to a reseller who thinks that Schools Agreement has been retired? (I had to correct one just 2 weeks ago).

Assuming a (somewhat short) 30 week year for term-time only staff, 200 hrs / 30 weeks = 6.6 hours per week. For staff working all year (say about 45-46 weeks), it's less than 4.5 hours per week. According to Microsoft's own Education and Channel Licensing Manager, the figure was come up with by looking at large institutions such as the Open University who have a lot of 'full time' lecturers who only actually teach a few hours per week. At the Microsoft conference in February I was deliberately blunt in pointing out that I would never class someone working 6 hours a week as equivalent to 'full time', but that's the way it is. elsiegee and I did also bring it up in the primary schools breakout as the sort of thing that gives primary schools the impression Microsoft doesn't really think about us when they come up with these sorts of schemes, and we did get an understanding look in exchange!

My impression from standing around at stations watching the wildly inaccurate arrival/departure times is that they don't seem to know where half the trains are themselves a lot of the time, so how could they be expected to provide a tracking service to anyone else?

This is classic XP driver behaviour on newer machines with HD audio chipsets. We saw exactly the same thing on a lot of our newer RM machines before we went to Windows 7. I believe the problem is down to the XP audio subsystem not supporting the internal notifications that are meant to switch the audio output from headphones to speakers. On older chipsets this was controlled by the hardware, but newer chipsets delegate this to software because the speakers and headphones can be used to play different audio streams independently. We never found a way around it, I'm afraid.

While there, don't refer to Florida as 'America's Wang'.

Anything in the Event Log under Applications and Services logs > Microsoft > Windows > Deployment-Services-Diagnostics

Hmm. For some curious reason, the full installer for Windows 7 x86 (17.2MB) decided to hit the web and download a 16.9MB .msu file from here. Not really sure why. Going to try a machine with no Internet connection to see if it still installs. UPDATE: worked just fine without an Internet connection, so why it insisted on downloading the installer again when it was able to, I don't know.

Full download links (not the web installers): Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows 7 Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows 7 64-bit and Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows Vista 64-bit and Windows Server 2008 64-bit

Yep, I know the 5400 series is a better choice, but having seen quotes for replacing the entire unit (given that I have 64x Gb copper and 8x mini-GBIC in there), I can't afford it right now. I can, however, afford some spares for if and when the 4208 falls over.

I have an HP ProCurve 4208vl as my core switch at them moment, and at the Microsoft conference a few weeks ago I was chatting to someone who said they might be looking to offload some spares they have for this model. Unfortunately I can't remember who it was! If you remember that conversation, or anyone else has spares going, please let me know how much you might want for them. I'm OK for copper modules (though if they are gigabit and the price is right I probably won't turn them down) but would be particularly interested in power supplies, mini-GBIC modules, or even a chassis. Thanks in advance, AT

What happens if you enable the option, make a site public, then disable the option?

My intention was to change as little as possible so that it would (hopefully) work with later versions without modification, so all I did was take Scratch.lnk out of the FeatureComponents so it wouldn't install.

The problem here is that the MSI has been created by someone who doesn't really know what they are doing with Windows Installer. They've created the shortcuts manually on their build machine and authored them into the MSI as files, instead of using the proper shortcut creation functions. Here's a couple of MSTs that fix it. One mirrors the existing functionality, while the other leaves out the shortcut to the Scratch website if you don't want that. Fix Scratch Shortcuts (No website link).mst Fix Scratch Shortcuts.mst

Oh come on guys, this one was too obvious: snopes.com: Man Dies at His Desk