Katy

Complicated here, everything runs Win 10 LTSB 1511 but my PC plus the music room run Win 10 Enterprise Anniversary (November version) as Sophos causes LTSB to be unable to boot* on that specific hardware**. We are going to roll out Win 10 Enterprise Anniversary over the summer as some of the problems with start menus appear to be fixed in it. * Sophos support couldn't help me without the minidump files, and Windows was crashing before it made them so no help. Worked fine for months on the hardware then suddenly broke. Very disappointed with how slow Sophos support were to reply to anything (2-5 days) ** To make it more complicated we have the same hardware but from a different batch in another room which was not affected.

As I found out with our laptops, having laptops instead of IT rooms with PCs only works if you either have enough technicians to baby sit them permanently or if the teachers are willing to look after them properly (i.e. don't let the kids throw them around, make sure they get back to the trolley OK, make sure they have been turned off and plugged in when back in the trolley, make sure the trolley is plugged in).

MPLS cost a fortune and the shared internet connection provided via the MPLS wasn't very good (too many schools compared to what it was designed for), so moved to normal leased line with meraki VPN. Not sure why they stopped joining schools as child domains as I work in one of the schools rather than centrally at the trust.

If it's the first one failing, make sure you already have a folder for each username within \\server\share for it to map to

I did this somewhere that had a Windows server but wasn't on a domain (the clients were all XP Home) - had to have matching user/passwords on the server and all the PCs for it to work. Put a batch file in the startup folder: net use n: \\server\path to map N: to \\server\path If you have folders named after usernames you could: net use n: \\server\path\%username% so that you just need the one script rather than a customised script per user If you want the drive to survive a logoff then: net use n: \\server\path /persistent:yes

When we ran everything over MPLS links, our trust has multiple domains in a forest, forest root domain is for the central systems/staff, child domain per school. Unfortunately it means starting fresh at each school to set it up. Now we switched to normal Internet connections at each school and VPNs to link together. Although now new schools that join are just added as domain trusts in AD so they don't have to trash everything and start fresh to join the forest.

You would expect even with the cheapest lowest level of support that they would check the firmware version before swapping parts, at a guess the new part was probably running the latest firmware and the rest of the kit was on old firmware so it got upset. Think HP need to go back to school and learn what the word "proactive" means.

Not naming names as we're not BTRD but when our new infrastructure was set up (outsourced, really annoys me as we could easily have done it ourselves) Veeam saved the backup of the SAN to a separate LUN on the same SAN. Admittedly it was then copied over to tape but first thing I did once we got control back was move the backups off the SAN and add in some disk storage in a remote cab to duplicate the backups to (as well as having the tapes).

Just found out that the BT line has fallen down from our house, so it's hanging low across the street. No idea how to get that sorted as we don't actually use it or have service on it, it's a ceased line. Not going to be fun calling them... I would imagine it will be like this: BT: "What's your phone number?" Me: "Don't have one" BT: "What's your BT account code?" Me: "Don't have one, not a customer" BT: "So you want to have a new line fitted?"

We lost the lid to our green bin at home (second time that's happened, broke off when the bin fell over and blown away never to be seen again). Wind picking up here too (Lytham so not far from Preston) and somehow blowing through my office despite the double glazed windows being closed Forecast said 49mph with gusts to 73mph here this morning. Glad I decided to wear trousers today with all the draughts in this place! Edit: Also the fence around the builders compound has blown over, and has either hit a car or had a close miss, hard to tell from here.

Ohhhh now it makes sense, Doris = Storm Doris. I did wonder why all the hate for somebody called Doris for a while then.

Using the XML I have this for the file explorer on the start menu on Win 10: Then inside the redirected start menu there is a shortcut to "This PC" (I think I made this on Win 8 where you could go to the desktop and right click on This PC -> Create Shortcut, doesnt seem to be an option to do that on win10). I've attached my shortcut (zipped) File Explorer Shortcut.zip

Wow that's digging up an old thread, but interesting to see how it's changed in 6 years. We have a single 1Gb link from each edge switch housed in the main server room (as they are in the next rack along from the core switch), 10Gb to each edge cab housed elsewhere, then on the 10Gb enabled cabinets we have 4 x 1Gbps LACP to each edge switch. There wasn't sufficient fibre installed to allow us to have a dedicated feed per edge switch.

We have a RDS server for all staff/pupil remote access (gives them access to files stored at school plus a few of the school applications that are installed on it). A couple of staff require access to their actual PC and we just enable remote desktop on the specific PCs, then have them connect via the remote desktop gateway running on the RDS server (this tends to just be the person doing the timetabling etc plus technical staff). We also try to cut down reliance on remote access by pushing Office365.

There is a registry setting that tells File Explorer to go to "This PC" instead of Quick Access when opened - I have it set as a group policy registry preference setting: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\LaunchTo = 1 (DWORD) Edit: if for some reason you change your mind and want Quick Access to be the default again then it needs to be set to 2.

Pricing I received from Cisco about this time last year:

We have Anytronic dimmers in the main hall and they do a "DMX Scene Controller" unit which can be programmed with DMX data. This unit plugs straight into the dimmers. When your DMX desk is turned on, it gets to control the lights, when the DMX desk is off the scene controller is in control. We have the house lights and all stage lighting on the dimmers so we just pre-set one of the 7 buttons to things like "House", "House and stage", "stage" etc and works really well.

We use some form of Dell Optiplex (they're Atom CPU, upgraded to 4GB RAM and some we put SSDs in) off ebay, cheap and can just about run Win7 if you get the ones with a hard drive. Small enough to leave sitting on a ceiling tile. Can't remember the model but they are about the size of an ipad but 1 inch thick, Also use LG screens as they have one button which can be locked to not do anything besides turn it on (you can prevent the button turning it off and do it via the remote or set a timer). Great for areas where the ceilings are too low to mount the screen out of reach. For the software we run Xibo.

Our hall and drama theatre both use hard wired dimmers, the lighting is pretty basic PAR64s with a few fresnel and profiles thrown in. Both rooms have a fat frog doing the DMX. We've also got some cheap PAR64 LEDs which we can use via the feature buttons on the fat frog but they are usually thrown up as floor mounted stand alone colour changing lights as they're not really bright enough to share a rig with a load of 1kW PAR cans. When we used to do our shows in-house we hired some fancy moving heads and I controlled these from the fat frog's feature buttons, not the easiest but it was doable with a bit of patience. Would like to replace them with decent LEDs but no budget

We have the ProPlus licence and everyone has Office 365, so we just tell them it is there for download but that we don't support home devices. Think we have a help sheet that shows them how to download and install and that's it. With the Office 365 linked version it does the licensing for you and gives them a list of devices it is installed on (with buttons to remove the licence from the specific device) so nothing that we need to worry about.

When I was at school on our Acorn network, you had to pay 50p for a reset if you forgot your password or were put in detention. I don't remember there being many reset requests at all, shame we can't go back to that

The switch off date is supposedly 2025 so not imminent but worth factoring in. We replaced our PBX recently, went with Toshiba (unfortunately as they have now abandoned all UK telephony) but we kept existing ISDN: ISDN30 -> ISDN/SIP gateway -> Toshiba IP PBX We are halfway through moving off ISDN onto SIP and it was fairly easy to do as you just point the PBX at the new SIP server. Outbound calls went live last month, inbound calls go live next week *fingers crossed* I think the RRP of the ISDN/SIP gateway we had was £800 or so, no idea why we did it that way (I wasn't involved in the phone system project) but if I was doing it now I'd have switched over to SIP at the same time and saved the money.

Annoys me how all these articles say "The solution is to remove CopyProfile from the unattend XML" but then doesn't go on to give a new "official" way to create the damn mandatory profile. There are technet articles published in 2017 that still claim the way to do it is CopyProfile=true and sysprep. I spent most of the day trying mandatory profiles with Win 10 (LTSB 2015), if you do it the "official" way by running sysyprep with CopyProfile=true in the unattend you get a broken start menu. If you copy the default profile without running sysprep then it works. Kinda defeats the purpose though but at least I can tweak the default profile's ntuser.man in regedit so better than nothing. I found the startmenu troubleshooter (http://aka.ms/diag_StartMenu) annoyingly you have to be an administrator to run it - using "run as" won't work as it will then examine the wrong profile - but it suggested ShellHostExperience (or ShellExperienceHost, forget which way it was worded) and Cortana modern apps needed re-installing. Only thing left to test on is build up a PC with Win10 off the domain and don't let the MDT script that removes the modern AppX packages run.

How are you creating your mandatory profiles? I have the problem where if a user has a mandatory profiles (created the "official" way with sysprep/CopyProfile) the start button just doesn't do anything - they can right click it to get the Win+x menu but left click and hitting the windows flag key on the keyboard just doesn't do anything. We also have problems with roaming start menus randomly going black or stopping working altogether, again the only fix is to reset the profile - and nothing is logged anywhere. It just seems Win 10 isn't ready for use anywhere except at home.

Ah, I now remember why we don't have mandatory profiles. Win 10 LTSB (v1511) - created a mandatory profile following the technet article and the start menu doesn't work. Clicking it does nothing, pressing the key on the keyboard does nothing. Exactly like this: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/160667-windows-10-mandatoy-profile-broken-start-menu.html @FN-GM did you ever manage to get mandatory profiles on 10 LTSB with working start menus?