Laptops self deleting???

chollerz91 · 15 Dec 2010 at 09:23

Hi, I desperately need the intelligence from you folk on this forum. I've been browsing for months, but never posted, so I know there is good advise to be found here.

Here is my situation,

I work as an I.T apprentice at my local school and in the media department there are 19 laptops. These laptops are HP ProBook 4710s. Now about a month ago the class teacher came to me and said her class were going to be using photoshop and would like a tutorial. Me and a colleague having the better knowledge of photoshop decided we would assist. Whilst doing this tutorial, it was apparent that each user was experiencing seriously "lag" i.e the laptops were running really slowly. (each user was logged into their school network account, we discovered turning the wireless off and disconnecting from the network made the laptops run perfectly)

So we decided for the next lesson, we would create each laptop a local profile and the student in the class would just have to remember what laptop they used each time, as their work would be saved to that hardrive of that specific laptop.

This seemed to work fine untill about two weeks ago, a girl came to our office and said her work had disappeared off the laptop she was working on. A superior colleague told me to run a program called "emergency undelete" - this found no results. It was not in the recycle bin nor was it on the laptop after a search of the hardrive. I tired restoring the "My Documents" to an earlier date and this had no effect either. A superior colleague was also baffled as to what had happened. I simply told the girl that there was nothing we could do, and it could have been a faulty hardrive - I also mentioned that she should start again and appologised. (This media class is only year 11 and it would take a basic user of photoshop around 20 minutes to complete their tasks, so its not a major disappointment, none the less it should not have happened?)

So everything seemed okay again, untill yesterday when another 9 laptops had the exact same problem? I done everything and anything to try and find the missing work. I'm getting the blame for these errors as I cant continue to blame the fault on 9 laptops having faulty hard drives.

Can anyone give any advise on this situation?

Thanks!

P.s The laptops are running Windows 7 professional 32bit

eXor · 15 Dec 2010 at 10:14

Finders Keepers.

Does this only happen with Photoshop? Malware scan been run?

Is there some disk space quota system in place?

Is some synchronisation software running?

I'd advise the students to save their work to Flash disks, while you pinpoint the problem.

anything I don't mind · 15 Dec 2010 at 12:03

They are probably saving to the wrong location.

Or they are not going to save as, just save and it is overwriting a template or some kind. I say user error. Ask them to show you how they open save the documents, to make sure that they are saving it correctly and to the correct place.

If they are saving it to the correct place on the hard drive, there is no reason for the work not save or vanish.

Rob7865 · 15 Dec 2010 at 12:15

Hi
Are you sure they are loggin in with the local profile, and or the profile is not being overwritten by a default or even a mandatory profile which clears the desktop?
- Check the users Profile tab in AD to see if its pointing the profiles somewhere else.

Rob

cokecan · 15 Dec 2010 at 12:15

I've not heard or witnessed this myself with W7 so I may be talking rubbish here but...I wonder if there is an issue with the profiles?

I'm thinking back to XP here where occasionally XP would forget who you are so when you log in, it creates you a temporary profile. The minute you log off that profile is deleted along with anything saved on it. The original profile with any saved documents in would still be there but the link between the profile and your account would break. I wonder if something similar is happening?

Though as I said, I've neither seen or read of this happening in W7 yet

Pestilence · 21 Dec 2010 at 09:28

First: You shouldn't be having them save their work locally. That will ALWAYS come back to bite you in the ass. As you're finding out now.

Second: Sounds like they're not logging in correctly or there's a profile configuration issue - offline files comes to mind.

Perhaps create a different folder for each on the root of the hard disk and instruct them to always save their work there, rather than within the My Documents area.

p_r_i_m_e · 21 Dec 2010 at 10:58

sounds like as the wireless is turned off they will be using a local profile as it can't authenticate to load the proper one, as the others have said don't save locally!