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Hi Our Performing Arts Centre have received a new high specced iMac predominantly for video editing. We have a small network of imacs but are predominantly Windows based. The existing macs are still able to be deployed/updated using Deploystudio but I believe this would not work with the new one. As this is only one Mac what would the best practice be for setting this up? Should I manually bind to the network etc, install Office, Sophos etc.. or is there a better more automated and secure way (withoiut too much of a learning curve)? Would it still link in with profile manager for drive and printer mappings? What would you recomend? Thanks

Does anyone have any experience of leasing Apple Mac suites of equipment for art, music or media studies? I have recently taken over running an IT Services department in a school where investment in all hardware has been patchy. The Mac estate is a mixture of 10-3 years old and, as a result is running various versions of software, some hardware is supported, some is not (and not likely to be due to age). We are also suffering in that students have up to date iMacs at home, start projects and then bring them into school to finish, only to discover that the version of software at school is out of date! I am potentially faced with asking for £65k to replace this kit (and this is without the licensing bill), and so am looking at alternatives that could help us spread the cost more. However, I would never usually go down the leasing route for anything other than managed printing, so I am interested in hearing if anyone has had positive experiences with leasing of Mac based equipment and can recommend a supplier, can warn me off, or share their lessons learned of such an exercise? Thanks very much.

Hi I have recently set up an iMac running OS Yosemite and it has Clevertouch 55" attached. The Lynx software works fine and fully interactively, but on everything else, the cursor moves with finger/pen on screen, but on tapping the screen, nothing happens and we have to use the mouse to click on anything. I can't find anything on the mac when looking under settings, applications etc. Any ideas? Am slightly pulling hair out. Thanks in advance.

My Imac g4 running 10.5.2 just displays a blue screen with a cursor on bootup, and all I can do is move the mouse, no menus or anything. I can't buy a fresh copy of osx for personal reasons, and have files on this the current os. It may have been a network boot, because on bootup it loads a lot of network settings, and it stopped working just after my powerline adaptor cooked itself. Any ideas?

Wotcha folks - am having issues with a pile of iMacs and wondered if any of you could shed some light. We have 16x iMac 20", 4Gb Ram, 250Gb Hitachi HDDs, Core2Duo 2.6Ghz (iirc) and an X-Server. The iMacs are authenticated to ActiveDirectory, with accounts managed by the X-Server. When users logon, OSX creates a local folder structure for each user (based on the template I created, which is nothing special). It also maps their Windows roaming home folder, and any necessary shares of our Win2k3 servers. So far, I've had to reinstall at least 5x of these iMacs as they bluescreen on poweron, at random, for no apparent reason. Single User mode > fsck -fy makes little difference (altho does repair a pile of fs issues apparently succesfully) - generally leaves me at the spinning bootup logo after it's been run rather than bluescreen, but will go no further. Only solution is to redo a Netinstall off the X-Server. At the moment we're considering splitting them from AD to see if that resolves the issue, but that knackers up multi-purpose useage by other departments (these are in the Music Dept, running Garageband and Cubase 4). I've also disabled all power management as have spotted posts on other forums regarding bluescreening being related to waking from sleep mode. Has anyone else experienced a similar issue with these latest iMacs under similar circumstances? I can't go 48 hrs before there's another one that needs sorting at the moment...

Hi, I've search everywhere for the answer and I've logged a call with Konica. From our iMacs and Macbooks (running a mixture of 10.6 & 10.8) when we print to our C284e it always prints double sided, we can find the setting on the macbook to change a print to single sided but the setting reverts back to double-sided after printing (no Apply like good old Windows). We can log on to the printers webpage and the double-sided setting is set to off. Has anyone got any ideas this is driving staff mad. Many thanks D

I have been given the nod and the wink by our site manager that the Art department are going to be campaigning for Macs in their new Art block when it's built next year. I am against this, on a number of grounds: * Cost of equipment * Training, for us and staff & students * Likelihood of theft - local thieves have a strong track record of targeting Macs * Difficulty of & limits to integration with the existing network (as I understand it) * I can't see the bloody point, CS5 runs perfectly fine on Win7 x64 and no better on x86-based Macs (to the best of my knowledge) I would, however, like some actual numbers to back me up. Can anyone give me some idea on what work needs to be done to integrate Macs (and how well this integration actualy works), what cost this comes at and how much it costs for technician training? I can cost up the iMacs themselves (just had a look, good lord). I only need ballpark figures to make an argument - should SMT want a full investigation I'll get more detailed prices from a reseller. I just want these figures for now, not a discussion on the benefits of Macs in a school.

Installing Windows XP on mid-late 2011 Apple Hardware (Drivers included are for Late 2011 iMac12,1) Step 1) You will need Windows XP Disc (I used XP SP3) and the new windows 7 bootcamp disc, bootcamp assistant will ask you if you want to download this, do so. Also you will need a wired usb mouse and keyboard. Step 2) Follow bootcamp as normal, and follow the xp install through. Step 3) Once installed, you will have no drivers and no support for keyboard and mouse, so plug in your wired keyboard and mouse in. Now use the drivers I have provided. I installed them in this order; Chipset Keyboard + Mouse (found on the downloaded bootcamp cd) Lan Wifi Firewire Facetime Audio HD Audio VGA (had lots of trouble with this, ended up going to nvidia website to download correct graphics driver, also it would not work running their installer, so extracted driver and installed via device manager) After this I tested and tested, because you don’t actually have bootcamp installed, you lose the functionality and options that gives you, put because we use bootpicker and osx and the default OS it hasn’t made any difference. As XP is not designed to work on this hardware, I haven’t found anything that hasn’t worked, but I cant guarantee everything will work for you. Once I was happy, I imaged using deploystudio. Drivers attached http://www.filedropper.com/imac2011xpdrivers Feel free to drop me a pm if you require help

Hi all, This is my first post here and I hope I am giving all of the necessary information. First of, I am talking about: 21 in iMac, 2010 Running El Capitan (OS X v. 10.11.2) 4 gb RAM 500 GB Hard Drive Windows AD Server running Server 2008 No OS X Server integration at this time. Only using AD Utility. We have been doing this for about 5 years with little hoops and bumps to get through. Login errors have come down to issues with wi-fi, network connectivity, Time Errors, and all of those were ironed out about 2 years ago and things have been running smoothly ever since. We were running on OS X 10.9 (Maverick) until I recently re-did the image. About three months before re-doing the image, I had one student user who was getting the following error when logging in on the Macs: You are unable to login to the user account "xxxxxx (insert username here)" at this time. Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred. Mind you, this was one user, and rather than look into it further, I knew it was time to re-image and upgrade anyway so I focused on that. The new image was put on, and the user with the error before was now able to login. However, about 2 weeks after the lab had been imaged, another user in the same OU had been getting the same error. Not only would he get that error, but everyone who logged in after he got the error would get the same error until the machine was rebooted (only on that machine, they could login elsewhere fine). Also, this user never has any issue with logging in to a windows machine. After checking the network folder permissions, deleting his home folder, and trying to delete any residual information on his network drive, I still was getting the same issue. The next step I tried was to dele his account and then added him back with the same credentials. However, his network folder was completely new (I backed it up, of course, but didn't put the backed up info in his folder yet). Now, all he gets when trying to login to the Mac's is the typical "shake" that happens when a username or password is incorrect. I don't even get the error anymore. I am now looking to see if anyone has any suggestions as I am at a loss and confused as to why this is only happening with one student, not every student or user login. Thanks!

Hi, I am trying to get Sibelius 7 to talk to the licence server that we have installed. The tests on the licence server suggest that all is OK, and there are no firewall issues. I think it has more to do with installing Sibelius with the information required to talk to the licence server. Has anyone done this before? Many thanks, Ben.

Hi, I have have currently upgraded our iMac suite to running the new 'Snow Leopard' and all is well apart from when users now log on and try and open there work/excel documents. It pop up with a "Cannot access read-only document 'File Name" pop up and then if you go ok to that it then shows you the message "Cannot access 'File Name". I have tried removing Microsoft off on of the computers and reinstalling it but no luck, i also tried removing the iMac from the network and rejoining it at that worked for about a day now it is popping up the messages again Has anyone else come across this problem? Its driving me MAD!!! Thanks a lot in advance

We have 6 iMacs which have no way of being cabled, and would like to wipe them at the end of each day in an automated process. We use Casper to manage our Macs, which we can get a nice thin image out of, but is there a way to partition Macs and point them to the localhost to act as their own NetBoot server? Thanks in advance for any advice!

We're looking at putting iMacs in to one of our DT suites as they have nice big screens, no base unit (space and security is an issue) (we are going to vesa mount them to something solid), seem fairly robust (glass front to the screen, aluminium case, no screws) and comparible in cost to a PC by the time you add a nice glass fronted screen and security features/desk to your normal desktop PC. We plan to dual boot them (XP / OSX) to allow DT to run their Autodesk Inventor software. We'd look at putting 2 in each of our libraries too so all students have the option of using them. Has anyone got any comments on Macs in schools? experience of managing them dual booted? recommendations of a partner in the South Yorkshire area that could advise us, set up a trial, supply us and possibly train us? We met companies at BETT but most were "down south" so I would imagine support may be an issue. ChrisJ Sheffield

We're looking at ways in which we can extend the service life of our older iMacs (2012, 2013 models - no longer under warranty) and one possibility would be to have the current 5400rpm HDDs replaced with SSDs. As we would envisage this involving at least 50 machines, we are looking to see if we can find a company who would be able to send technician(s) on-site and perform the replacements in bulk here. These Macs are no longer under warranty so we would not be concerned about using non-Apple parts, but the companies we've contacted so far have all given us the same kind of response: "2013/2013 models are likely to be considered 'vintage', this means that Apple no longer manufacture serialised parts needed for repairs and service." I'm assuming this means there's some kind of lock-in agreement that Apple has with their service centres? Can anyone recommend a third party company (not locked in by Apple) who might be prepared to do what we're asking for?

Hi I have recently set up a Clevertouch 55" with an iMac running latest Yosemite OS. The Lynx software works fine but for everything else although the cursor follows input from finger/pen the click does not work - e.g. on a hyperlink - and we have to use the mouse to click. I can't find anything in Settings or Applications - under Hardware it is only picking up the Visualiser that is attached, not the board. Am pulling hair out and would LOVE some help! :/

I've got a user who, since September, has had no issues logging in and working on our iMacs (XServe network). Yesterday the user reported that none of their work was visible upon login. Their home folder doesn't exsist (or is somehow in the wrong place...) - and time machine backups do not contain a trace of their home folder. The iMacs that they have used were checked, and local home directories exist - with no work in them. The same day, when I logged in to the XServe, I was presented with a message indicating that it crashed and restarted unexpectedly (first time I've known it to do this). Could it be that their home directory was not correctly created but they were still able to login and retrieve work done in previous sessions - and when the XServe failed, all the work was lost. I don't see how this is possible but it's my only guess at the minute, given the is no trace of the user within our users share. Any thoughts would be appreciated...

Hi, We setup a dualboot Mac suite over the summer with OSX and Win7, All working OK except the keyboard special keys when running windows. Students have mandatory profiles which are setup on a network share. This works great on most of the Windows 7 Computers, but the iMac's have a strange keyboard layout and this confuses teachers because they press a \ and get # etc Is there a group policy setting, reg key or batch script that I can setup so when users are on the apple computers it uses the Apple Keyboard layout setting? I did consider changing the profile but this would mess up the standard keyboard computers or changing the keyboards, but there has to be a way to do it. Thanks,

I have a suite of imac's and plan to partition the hard drives to overcome an issue with importing videos within imovie. However for simplicity, I would like to create an icon on the desktop to link to the partition volume. Simply to allow the students to copy work from the partition to their own home drive. Is there a way of mounting the drive to multiple users on the same machine/