JimHew

I have always had the impression that the refurbs are never really that much cheaper - that is at least what I have gathered from other suppliers! I have just had a quick browse at what Dave could do for us, and I'll certainly consider him next time!

Exactly this, another rather humorous feature is that whoever coded the BIOS couldn't be bothered to fill out the machine manufacturer. So when I say we have 30-odd Zoostorms, I mean we have 30-odd OEM TO BE FILLED BY MANUFACTURERs.

I'd think twice about Zoostorms, they're the newest machines in our school and we want rid of them already! [EDIT] Well... by newest I mean they were bought around 2014. If we could get rid of them we would but... (all together now) our budget won't stretch that far!

Yeah, another for NetSupport Notify. It seems a lot of users on here have implemented it! It works pretty well and pretty quickly!

We use PaperCut MF. If the kids want to print in colour, they send it to the virtual colour_students queue, then the teacher can log in to the web interface and dispatch jobs to an MFD of their choice. It works pretty well, and we haven't had many issues with it.

As far as I'm aware, the clients can be installed on as many PCs as you like, but the server accepts the clients on a first-come-first-served basis. So it shouldn't matter if you reinstall the client on a rebuilt PC... Sorry I didn't offer much more of a solution, but perhaps this helps

Damn, that's rather annoying. Also there's the issue of it not letting you back it up to a school email address, so we can't use the staff member's 1TB of OneDrive storage. So if they were to leave the school, and it was set to back up to a personal Microsoft account, we've got no way of stopping them from accessing their backups. This was the bigger issue for us than the factory reset. I don't know if this will be of any help to you but I'll tell you how we're going to proceed with them. As they are going to be school owned devices, we are going to set them up and manage/issue them. They're going to be backing up to G-Drive accounts that we've set up,and if anyone wants anything from a backup, they'll have to come to us.

@kennysarmy I was setting up one of these last week, and also wanted to reset it. So you maxed out the password attempts and it just formatted itself? I would have thought it would take you through the whole rigmarole of setting it up from scratch!

Okay, I have tried only disabling the classic menu - That didn't work on it's own. I don't want to rename the xmls just yet as we have one menu for the staff (SIMS and spiceworks shortcut) and one for the kids (calculators and that) I'll definitely look into the folder redirection for the start menu, as according to this, it seems like it works!

We took receipt of 33 brand new Stone PCs over the summer and after I built a few of these machines (Windows 10 (1511) - we don't trust the start menu with anything later than this), I found that the start menu issue that you are describing is exactly the same as what we have. Out of all the PCs in the school, only these new machines have the issue. I have tried replacing the graphics driver (as someone suggested) with one from Dec 15. But with no luck. I have ran an sfc /scannow and a dcim repair (as also suggested) but again with no luck. I think it's absolutely incredible how no one knows a true way of fixing this - including Microsoft. It's not like the OS has been current for the past two years! I'm sorry I haven't got a solution, but i thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. If anyone has any other ideas they'd be appreciated.

Was there any reason behind this? I wasn't expecting the silence to last so long!

Hi @Al_NetSupport, today SLT here have said they want to review security policies and this sounds ideal! We've got two Edugeek users here, and since you let a couple of other do it, can we get 300 total too please? We are going to go through with it anyway, but 300 would cover us nicely!

Hi everyone, First-time poster here. We are running into a bit of trouble with one of the courses that one of our IT teachers is running. They are running an a-level course this year and to complete it the students will need to run a social media campaign. The deadline is looming and the IT teacher is starting to panic, SLT are remaining quiet, and we (techs) are being pressured into making things happen. Now, social media sites are all filtered, so we are tying to figure out how to allow access to them, but restrict it to lesson time only. We obviously don't want to blanket-allow all students access as that would be chaos. We have toyed with two ideas: Individually allowing each of the student's normal profile to bypass the RM SafetyNet filter using the staff proxy. But this would mean enabling and then disabling this for each student, every week at the start and end of the lesson. Creating new, blank profiles that we can assign to students and have them constantly unfiltered, but blocking the accounts (in AD, en masse) whenever the lesson is not running, to stop the students from logging on outside of lesson. It is an Edexcel course and this is the criteria the students need to meet: 3/BC.D3 Demonstrate individual responsibility, creativity, and effective self-management in the planning and use of social media in a business context. 3/C.M3 Optimise the content, format and features of social media which meet the requirements of the plan. 3/C.P5 Produce business-related content using appropriate features of social media which meet the requirements of the plan. 3/C.P6 Review data obtained on social media usage and interaction. Has anyone out there had any experience with doing this kind of thing, maybe even with this course? Oh, and to make things worse, our enterprise provider is changing our ISP this Thursday 2nd Feb (Monday 30th Jan today), which will bring with it a new piece of filtering software (that we haven't had hands-on with yet) called NetSweeper. If anyone could give us a heads up with this new filter and if we can do what we want more simply, that would be fab. Thanks everyone, a bit of a stinker, I know! James