I have a classroom with ~20 PCs. One for the teacher and all others are for students. They all have pre-installed licensed Windows 7 Home Premium (cause reasons) and reinstall OS to another is not an option :( Also they all are in same work-group (in one net).
Is there any tools (like Active Directory \ VNC \ "Microsoft Garage Mouse without Borders" etc.) which can do exactly the same operations at exactly the same time on all students computers from the "main" teacher-pc? For example: I start this "magic" program in small window, it connects to all PCs (if it can), then I move my mouse inside it to the left and all mouses on all PCs moved the same way. Press Start - it will open Start on all student-PCs. It's some kind of botnet program (I suppose), but it will help a lot.
VNC not good, cause you must reconnect every time and do the same operations x19 times - eh...
AD as I read didn't support Home Premium (or I misunderstood?) - eh again.
If there is no such tool\tools, what kind of OS (may be some Linux distributives) can do such thing?
Well,
Let me take this in three different perspectives.
1) Sharing the screen. There comes a hardware called as screen splitter (Use the one which requires power adapter)
Pros : scalable witout using Netowrking., No lag.
Cons : View only mode, Students cannot perform any action.
2) Sharing the desktop
As you have already mentioned, there are tools like teamviewer (Internet/LAN), VNC (LAN) which can be used. They require network access hence the connection might drop at time.
Pros: Students have simultaneous access to their machine
Cons: Connection may be an issue
3)Only sharing the resources
I dont think this is of your use but Active directory in windows and LDAP or LTSP on Linux is something which helps achieve resource sharing but doesnt help in desktop sharing.
IMO: You have to either go by 1 or 2. Both at the same time cannot be achieved with a legacy.
EDIT: My asnwer is considering you as a teacher and not sys admin. In the later case, tasks might be different which can be handled in various other ways.
Related
I have a computer-based test that takes several hours to complete.
However, the test is timed-out at some point, because my PC "goes to sleep in one way or another".
This is possibly related to the fact that the test consists of two processes which communicate with each other via port, so I'm suspecting that perhaps networking is disabled in some way (even if it's completely "local networking").
I have disabled both screen turn off and sleep in the Settings "page", under Power & Sleep.
Still no luck, the screen is locked with a password at some point, which I suspect causes the test to stop running in the background.
I even followed a procedure that I found on the web to disable screen-lock via Regedit in something like 18 steps (why on earth did this company figure out that this is a reasonable user experience).
Is there a solution to this problem?
Found a (very hacky) solution:
If you keep all windows minimized, then the screen doesn't get locked.
What a great operating system, by such a great company!!!
I wrote a compiled MATLAB GUI that we run on a remote machine via Remote Desktop. Overall it runs fine, but sometimes the GUI will blank out many of the control objects (buttons, table, popups). It seems to happen after the screen of the client computer has been locked or after the GUI has been minimized.
If you move the mouse over the buttons, popups, or table headers, they reappear. The table cells will reappear if they are selected. The GUI hasn't crashed and still works fine, but the objects just disappear until you make them reappear again. I have only seen this happen when using remote desktop (Windows-Windows using Remote Desktop Connection).
How can I get this to stop happening? It isn't really breaking anything, but it is very annoying.
I don't know if this is an issue with MATLAB or with the Remote Desktop configuration, so I posted this question here. Feel free to move this to superuser if you think it's more appropriate.
Remote Desktop has issues with handling low level rendered graphics, and interacting with graphics cards. In our experience (we use Nvidia GPU's for rendering and computation engines on multiple projects/applications) we have found remote desktop to fail in so many cases, that we have ditched it for a third party tool.
I suspect this is what you are running into.
One option I would consider, is forcing Matlab to do software rendering, if this fixes the problem, then for certain it's the graphics cards. The first hit on a google search for "matlab software rendering" returns the matlab command opengl. Reading the documentation page for that, gives the command:
opengl software
It sounds like the remote desktop minimization is causing it. For efficiency, Windows will disable various graphics when a Remote Desktop window is minimized on the client computer. To prevent this, create and set a DWORD RemoteDesktop_SuppressWhenMinimized to 2 at the following registry location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client
After doing this minimizing and locking your screen shouldn't do anything to the RDP session. I doubt it's a graphics card issue, as Windows 10 Creator's Edition allowed remote sessions to use the remote graphics card just like as if you were running locally.
Given that Outlook runs in most offices, and given that a screensaver may user CPU, or network file copies, or virus scans, or network installs by the admin (granted, that usually happens when you're logged out), and all the myriad other things that might occur on a Windows 7 desktop in an office environment, how could I possibly know that a user is idled out, and not just reading a PDF?
Do I use a set of metrics to sample at regular intervals and use that to determine "away" or do I need to monitor some file, is there a API that should be exposed?
I can't rely on screensavers being active, or the computer entering a specific power state, and I'm not sure what is exactly off-limits, but I also don't know what's on-limits, as it were.
I think you're looking for GetLastInputInfo, which tells you how long it's been since the user hit a key on the keyboard or wiggled the mouse (or touched a touch-enabled screen?).
I'm in need of help. The situation is the following:
We have a software that runs on Windows Mobile 5 and 6. It is deployed in around 15 cities on different devices (Motorola MC35, MC55, MC65, MC75, MC75A, ES400). It works perfectly fine everywhere except in one city. They have MC75A devices and every once in a while we get a helpdesk about our software disappearing from the device.
The most interesting part is when we log in to check the device, all we can see is a damaged/corrupted file system and the OS, which is set back to default.
We tried to reconstruct the problem here at our company, but we find it impossible. I'm wondering if anyone has ever bumped into this.
I'm gonna attach two images of the corrupted file system.
We use custom windows settings and AppCenter to protect the operating system from our customers. (They shouldn't be able to modify any settings on their own).
In general such corruption happens when the driver is interupted saving changes to the file system.
That can happen, for example, when a high priority thread consumes all cpu times.
It may also happen, when the device is hard reset, for example by taking the battery out during thed river is writing to the file system.
A low battery normally cannot result in that corruption:
a) as the device shuts down itslef with critcal battery power
and
b) the file system is in flash RAM (in contrast to Windows Mobile 2003 and before) and does not need battery power to hold data.
It is also possible that there is a bad behaving process doing these corruptions.
As you say you see this only in one city: What is the main difference with the devices there?
Are others also using the same device? Maybe the device series itslef or there firmware is faulty (contact symbol/motorola for new firmware or patches to the 'disk' driver)
Are the users in that area doing special things to the devices that others do not? For example remove the battery when they mean the device does not react?
Is the MC75A used in other areas and there it does not show the corruption?
You see, you have some more items to examine a rule for the corruption?
I need a windows installer that can install my program only X number of times. Say 10 or 20 or a defined number I set. Then the installer ceases to operate or can give a message to contact my company.
Ed
There are several solutions.
One solution that is quite common is to require online authentication for the program for each new install.
Solutions that may be viable in some situation:
Self modifying executable. Just let the installer modify itself and reduce some counter. But it is easily defeatable by making multiple copies of the executable.
If you want to limit the installer only on one computer add some registry key and check that. Also easily defeatable
In my opinion the best way to doing this is using a hardware block/dongle. They're awful for the user, but they work in limiting access. The other advantage to these blocks, is that you can install the software on numerous pcs, but the software can only run on the pcs with plugged in usb keys.
Another solution to have some form of an encrypted file/db, that whenever an installation is flagged as complete, it adds a value. When the number of values reaches X, then setup won't work anymore
EDIT
the real issue is that most applications are installed using a dvd/cd, in order to limit the number of installations, you need to be able to write back to the dvd. I don't think this is feasible in most cases.