speckytecky

Apart for the one glitch they had I've been extremely happy with Sophos.

Personally I think it's fabulous. Nice and clear, easy to navigate and functional. What more could anyone ask for. Well done @bazgee

Thanks for the replies and suggestions folks. Much appreciated. I was wondering if it was an update that had kicked off the restart but no it doesn't seem to be that. Yes, post the hard restart it came back slowly but happily. So far it's been running ok the rest of the week. Looking at the Event Log it was showing that it also did an unexpected restart last Sunday at 1645 hours in the afternoon. The tin hasn't been opened since it was installed close on six years ago. All 4 hard disks seem to be happy. So, memory is looking like the most likely culprit then. It's still Nader a warranty till September so call to the superb server support folk at Dell on Monday morning. Thanks again you you wonderful people for your responses.

Came in this morning to find our fileserver (Dell T610 running 32 bit Server 2008 standard) was frozen. By that I mean it was powered, but the screen, mouse and keyboard were not responsive. Couldn't remote into it either. Forced to do a hard reboot in the end. Looking at the Event viewer revealed nothing obvious other than the server seemed to have decided by itself to shut down at 1946 hours last night. Nothing set to shut it down so it's a complete mystery. Especially why if it had some sort of instruction to shut down it had actually hung?

How many users are you talking about. If not a lot couldn't you log onto their accounts and delete each message?

Very, very sad. A fine chap. In my days with the Lib Dems I met him a few times. R.I.P.

Ah, now if only that message were more widely understood by Teaching Staff - most of mine are convinced that it happens either by default, wave or a magic wand or is just something that naturally happens:)

Paul Scaling or Sammy Dunn at Phoneixs is a useful chap to have a conversation with as well. Tel:01904 562200. Their specialism is in Software - particularly for education.

It would be feeding air quite nicely if the 'experts' who fixed it to the wall hadn't put it snug against the ceiling and left hand wall. Numpties - not getting them back in again that's for sure.

The TP-PoE switch weighs in at 6.7 KG. Some super answers here. Your recommendation @Gaz sounds well worth testing. In the meantime I'm going to try some cable ties. The particular cabinet in question is fairly new, was supplied and fitted by an external company but they didn't even fit it square and the left side is inaccessible because they have mounted it tight to the ceiling and left wall. Not using them again! Thanks all for your extremely useful answers. The shelves I was looking at @FN-GM were closing on a ton!

Now that sounds a really innovative and inexpensive solution. Thanks indeed @achedgy

Thanks @FN-GM Yikes the prices! How on earth can they justify them I wonder?

We have a few TP-Link PoE Network Switches in our cabinets and are noticing that they are sagging on the supplied front brackets. Does anyone know of a product available (rail perhaps) to sit under the rear end to give some support?

Thanks @DaveP it seems to be a problem with a HP Procurve switch. I've switched it off and left it half a minute then switched it back on and the three affected workstations are back on the network.

Running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. Occasionally (when running SIMS it seems) there is a matchbox warning box on the screen entitled Core. It doesn't seem to do anything - and ideas please?

I have now up a new user in the Office Staff user Group. Logged on to the machine that's most heavily hit by this issue and all seemed to be ok. Logged on with Administrator rights during the day the machine was stable whilst I carried out both a Sophos AV scan - clean and a MalwareBytes scan - a few minor registry hijacks quarantined. The User Group pick up their profile from a logon.bat and their home directory lives on the SIMS Server.

Nope, SIMS is set up on a separate 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2 box that does just that, plus a little bit of Print server it's also acting as a second DC. DNS, DHCP and all the other relevant services are on its older sister which is running 32 bit Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition. No errors in DHCP. The blip yesterday was put down by the Office staff as due to the heavy rain. Additionally one of them tells me that fairly regularly she has disappearing icons issues at about the time the students mass log on but apparently it then all comes back on its own.

This issue seems to be running deeper in my school. We have a dedicated 64 bit Windows 2008 R2 Server and the key Administration Staff have profiles to this Server. On Tuesday our excellent Capita Support guy did a remote session and applied al the latest SIMS updates across our Domain. Wednesday morning the Server was restarted early in the day (0615 hours) post Micsrosoft Updates. Also the relevant workstations had picked up updates from the WSUS. Everything worked fine and dandy for at least 3 hours with users logged on then first one lady reported that she was getting this Fault described in this thread when trying to add data to the behaviour section for a student. Next within minutes two other users of this staff group complained they had lost both Internet and desktop. Checking the infrastructure and other users on the domain it was quickly apparent this was isolated to this user group. Logging on to one of the workstations with my staff user account confirmed this. About half an hour later after switching the machines off and on again they were able to restore normal work with desktop and Internet access restored. Thought no more about it. Until today! My day off and I received an urgent message from my line manager that the issue had struck again. With a message Local Area Connection doesnt have a valid IP configuration. Suggested Shutdown and restart. This carried out with a further Windows Security warning: detected a possible attempt to compromise security....& please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you. User logged on but access issues and lack of desktop continued. SIMS Server Restarted user logged on still with same issues. We seem to be stuck with this issue now - any suggestions as to what's going on please? Primary bad time to post this I expect if I wanted an answer!

Ran out some MS updates this morning to some of our workstations and one Admin user on a SIMS W7 workstation is reporting an error 1829-4733-7100 Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object. System Invalid Operator Exception. Not happening on workstations that haven't had the MS updates. Rang CAPITA Support - 10th in the queue. Anyone else having similar issues?

We currently have a six year old 32 bit Dell T610 running the standard edition of Server 2008 as our DC / Fileserver and associated roles. I'm currently writing a paper to the SMT to justify replacing it with a blade server running Server 2012 with Hyper-V. Any tips on what to include in my case would be much appreciated along with suggested specification and suggestions on what to make Virtual. We are a Special EBD school currently with under 100 KS3/4 students. Currently there is 450GB of data on the Fileserver which has a separate 50GB partition for the OS which now has less than 5GB of free space. Back up is currently to LTO 4. We have a separate Office Managemrnt server and a dedicated Remote Desktop Server.

I use it and find it's invaluable. Saves me hours of trying to do things through Group Policy or other traditional ways. Superb for monitoring and locking down. Nothing I don't like about it at all. I haven't let my teachers near it though as I trialled one who was meant to be Head of ICT and seemed to spend a lot of time unlocking stuff she had actually locked!

We are a Special School for boys with Emotional and Behavioral difficulties. We have run one BTEC PE module successfully but it was a mare to do, several resets required which for our boys is one step beyond. Luckily all but one managed to get through without any great upheaval; the one lad I ended up having to move to a different PC and bless him he completed it in the end but I think in his circumstances I'd have kicked off myself!

Michael Hinchliffe at Misco always comes up with the goods for us at a reasonable price as well. The good thing with the Toshiba Sat Pro is the keyboard is a nice easy one to swap out. Mind in general I detest laptops for classroom use, staff constantly fail to supervise acceptable use and therefore the flipping things end up with mangled cables or other damage and then there's the batteries that invariably need replacing before the machine is past its best. I just can't understand why the message never gets through that laptops are just not up to the job - especially in a school like mine where our students are KS3/4 emotionally and behaviourally special needs!

So, according to the BBC Windows 10 will be the end of the road Microsoft to stop producing Windows versions - BBC News. Can't see that myself, a most confusingly written article!

Yes, up again now here as well. Thanks @fiza