AngryTechnician

Poor choice of word from me; when I said resilient, I really should have just said reliable, i.e. doesn't go down that often. iSCSI can cope with links dropping, I just wouldn't want it happening daily. Setting up DPM wasn't a technical challenge for me. Compared with other System Center products I've used (SCCM, SCE), it was actually quite easy. Obviously I don't know your level of technical expertise, but you seem like you are knowledgeable enough to manage it without consultancy. Do you have an onsite Exchange or SharePoint? I found it easier to set up than either of those... Definitely use RAID5 on the NAS; yes it's only a backup, but if your backup gets toasted due to a disk failure and the very next day the Head wants some files he deleted back, you'll really wish your backup wasn't toasted. I would be surprised if you find the incremental data transfer during the day to be a problem. I will take a better look tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure the bandwidth usage is actually quite light, plus you can always throttle it. Here's what the throttling settings look like so you see what sort of flexibility you have to work with: These settings are per-computer, so you can set different throttling on different servers. On the subject of licensing, consider whether you actually need the DPM feature set for all those servers. As I said, I use a combination of DPM and WSB. Specifically, I use WSB on the servers where all I'm really interested in is disaster recovery, i.e. the server went pop and I want it back to how it was last night. WSB works just fine to an iSCSI device, so I use the same NAS for both backup types. DPM is used where I frequently want to restore of specific files or SQL server data, or can't afford to lose a whole day's data.

I currently back up to an iSCSI NAS using a combination of DPM 2010 and Windows Server Backup. Although I am currently doing this over a 1Gb connection to the opposite side of our (large) site, it was on a 100Mb line at one point and worked just fine. If your intersite links are resilient and actually gives you 100Mb, I don't think you'll have a problem, especially if you are able to prioritise traffic on your network and schedule the heaviest parts of the backup out of hours. I've had very few problems with DPM, and it not only has bandwidth throttling built-in but transfers changes to the backed-up data throughout the day (every 15 minutes by default). The systems that use WSB are scheduled for out of hours. The amount of data I'm transferring is around the same as yours, though in my case it's all from the main server room rather than split up.

The only way to get movement on this is to get someone senior to them onside. As others have said, gather evidence, and present your case to a sympathetic member of SMT. My Director of Studies recently raised this in a whole staff meeting and it worked wonders, because all the staff who had been disadvantaged by people overbooking were able to chime in and back him up, which made it very difficult for any of the culprits to argue against him and shamed pretty much all of them into changing their ways.

What router are you using? I ask because I had a Linksys not too long ago that did weird things with particular clients.

I assume you don't still have the batch file to look and see what it changed?

I use a free and basic one called Youblisher

0870? I should be so lucky. When I said premium rate, I meant it. When I last dealt with them in 2007, it was an 0900 number. Yes, really. Paying £7 for some prat to tell me I need to power off the cablemodem for half an hour and then power it on again before they will bother doing any diagnostics was possibly the most infuriating customer support experience I will ever have (especially when the engineer who eventually came to replace the modem told me that fault had happened to everyone who had the kind of modem I had due to configuration changes on Virgin's end).

Again, no issues with that here. Hell, I watched a non-admin upgrade the sodding firmware of the board the other day. Made me slightly nervous, but certainly put paid to any questions I ever had about it needing admin rights!

Is this only on the new SMART Boards that can tell the difference between fingers and pens? I haven't changed a thing on our Windows 7 machines and have had no reports of any issues with our SB660 boards.

I suspect you will notice a difference between the Centrino and Core Duo CPU. You can always upgrade the RAM in the machine later, same can't be said for the CPU.

Love it, consider it stolen.

Oh that reminds me of the 3 separate occasions I was threatened with debt collectors by them, all for previous tenants. On every occasion they wouldn't believe me when I told that the previous tenants had moved out, and eventually I gave up trying to explain it to them and waited for the debt collectors to send a letter. Funnily enough, the debt collectors VM use are actually quite pleasant to deal with (at least when it's not you they are after) and frankly quite a relief after dealing with boneheaded VM call operators.

That's not how I remember it. Is the broadband faults line still a premium rate number? And do they still lie to you about refunding the cost if it turns out to be a problem with their equipment? I was stung with that one a while ago and that was the straw the broke the camel's back. Also remember having an interesting conversation with them about how service was down, and they knew it was down, but it wasn't mentioned on the recording on the free service status number because it was "scheduled maintenance", despite the fact it wasn't on the scheduled maintenance webpage, and was in the middle of the day. It was the last of many, many problems I put up with from them and I will never be a Virgin customer again.

Our teachers weren't hard to convince when I told them it didn't work properly on Windows 7. They said the planner bit was junk anyway, all they really wanted was the homework sheets that come with it.

In the GPP mapped drive, do you have the 'Reconnect' box ticked? If so, try unticking it. Sounds counter-intuitive but it's helped me in the past.

What version of Windows is this on? I have seen the same thing with XP before...

BBC News isn't exactly renowned for thorough reporting. I'd be surprised if any paedophile was sentenced without having a psychiatric report prepared. I think we can probably agree that they all have something wrong in the head.

Damnit, it's been so long I forgot that I had in fact done this, and suspect my MST won't work without it. Willith has posted the method for achieving this in his post above. As a tip for testing, I always test transforms and edits before deploying them by calling a command line similar to this: msiexec /i setup.msi TRANSFORMS="\\path\to\transform.mst" /qb Suppresses all the UI except the progress bar, so you can test any automation you've put in the transform. It's a pretty good approximation of a GPO deployment with a lot less hassle.

Consider also that many paedophiles are generally considered to have mental health issues and compulsively seek out images such as those found in the first case. Conversely, the handyman in the second case was quite deliberate in his actions and knew exactly what he was doing. That said, I agree that the extremity of the difference definitely raises questions.

This is great news, though technically it's not free 'now', but will be free "in early October". Just something to think about before we all rush out and install it today.

I'm attaching an MST that worked for me last time I deployed Quicktime 7.65.17.80 onto Windows 7. I haven't tested it with later versions as I don't deploy Quicktime any more (no-one's missed it yet). Things this MST does: Removes all the shortcuts Stops the QT tray icon from being installed (Theoretically) prevents the nag screen to upgrade to Pro Stops the updater from being installed As always, YMMV. AT Install Options 1.0.mst

Yes that the screen you want, just change the Multiple displays dropdown to 'Extend these displays'.

Yes, it's called "Windows". The feature is called 'extended desktop' or 'DualView' and is built in, but you have to have the hardware to support it. Specifically, your graphics card has to have two outputs, instead of one output that is split with a cable or VGA splitter box. On desktops, support is limited to those that have higher-end graphics cards. Desktops with integrated graphics on the motherboard almost never support it. However, almost all laptops support it as the VGA output is treated as a second socket, independent of the integrated screen.

Haven't found one for 2010 but here's the System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Getting Started Guide The documentation for a lot of System Center products makes them look far more complicated and difficult than they actually are. They are very thorough but horribly inaccessible.

Does CC4 even leave the local Administrator account enabled? On CC3 it was always disabled.