My brothers school laptop

Nate Silvers said:
It was locked so bad he couldn't even use a LAN cable to use our home wired internet.
Click to expand...

The school probably uses a proxy server for internet access, you would have just needed to changed the Internet Explorer proxy settings to get around this at home. People like you are nightmares for school ICT technicians.
 
Last edited:
As a technician in a secondary school i would refuse to perform any maintenance on a laptop that has clearly been tampered with, especially (as already stated) if questionable software/OS has been installed onto it.

There is a reason the schools ICT support configure the laptops in a particular way so just don't mess and expect them to fix any **** you may cause
 
A major change like this should be easily noticable to who ever is managing the schools network ... and if the OP's brother pays £5 a month for it then he doesn't "own" it at the moment.

I can easily see him getting into a lot of trouble for this being done to the machine assigned to him and I would expect that the ICT support staff will be re-imaging it.
 
Last edited:
memyselfandi said:
A major change like this should be easily noticable to who ever is managing the schools network ... and if the OP's brother pays £5 a month for it then he doesn't "own" it at the moment.

I can easily see him getting into a lot of trouble for this being done to the machine assigned to him and I would expect that the ICT support staff will reimaging it.
Click to expand...

Yep, there's a reason why we don't let student users have local admin rights, mainly because it lets viruses and adware run with impunity - you are being pretty naive and irresponsible doing what you are doing - mess around with your own laptop but don't mess around with something you don't have a clue about.
 
Fonz-Valo said:
As a technician in a secondary school i would refuse to perform any maintenance on a laptop that has clearly been tampered with, especially (as already stated) if questionable software/OS has been installed onto it.

There is a reason the schools ICT support configure the laptops in a particular way so just don't mess and expect them to fix any **** you may cause
Click to expand...

I personally think that in schools and the workplace the user should be given two options:

  1. You have a heavily restricted account. Only approved tested programs can be installed, and you can't do it anyways you have to get Systems Admin dept to do it. When the laptop has software problems Systems Admin dept will fix it for you.
  2. You have a full admin account. You can install whatever rubbish you want, aslong as the license for the software permits business use. You can change whatever settings you want. When the laptop has software problems Systems Admin dept won't help you at all. They'll re-image it for you but that's it, no software support.

IIRC that's how someone told me it's done at IBM.
 
Well nobody needs to maintain it because he has a tech savvy brother. His account is still restricted and it has the same anti-virus the school installed. He's not going to get into any trouble as I'm responsible. The most that will happen is they re-image it. If that happens then fair enough let it be but these laptops are for learning and why give a laptop that you can't do anything on because it's locked down like a goverment nuclear facility. Some of the other kids laptops come on Windows 7 (the expensive option laptop) so why not his, it's exactly the same except it's not XP.

Westyfield2 I think that is a very fair idea, an option to take responsibility, it's not hard to maintain a computer if your working at IBM.
 
Last edited:
Just because someone works for an IT company does not mean that they are necessarily able to maintain a windows laptop, you are assuming that the person, even if they are in a technical role, actually works with Wintel based equipment which is not necessarily the case. In fact a lot of places will just reimage to a standard build instead of lengthy investigation on software issues so that the member of staff can get working again. What Wesyfield2 says is used in the corporate world, (I have local admin rights on my corporate laptop and if I want to install anytihng on it I have to be able to proove that it is licensed for business use even if it's freeware), but it would be madness to do this in an academic environment due to the trouble their "user" could then cause, in fact my best mate is a manager at an universities IT department and is always complaining about the problems he has over this sort of thing.

What is on other laptops and what has been configured on them does not matter ... you have installed unlicensed software, i.e. Windows 7, and the current owners of the device, i.e. the School or LEA, could be liable due to that license breach. The is something the ICT department is liable to take very seriously.

You keep on saying that you'll take the responsibility but that responsibility is not yours to take. He is the "keeper" of the laptop and the buck will stop with him. You have just enabled him to breach the agreement which was probably made for the acceptable and continuing use of the device when he received it.

The laptop has been provided as a learning tool ... that learning does not include screwing around with it in this way. For that sort of thing use your own equipment.
 
The thought occurs that windows XP would run better than windows 7 on an eee 904, the reinstall would be more subtle and the defense of 'my brother made it work again' would be more convincing. It might be a good call to put XP back on it, using the code on the base, before he takes it in on Monday and the other students notice it's different.

His brother doesn't seem that tech savvy so far, laptops can be bloody difficult to fix occasionally. I was convinced I could fix anything with computers about three years ago, I've since completely changed my mind.

One option is to nuke the hard drive and hand it to the school tech support going 'it wont turn on' and they'll probably curse and reimage it without issue. I might google tiny 7, I think I remember tiny xp being illegal so it seems likely tiny 7 is. Every hit on Google comes up with "Windows Tiny7 Unattended Activated" which sounds distinctly pirated to me, otherwise where did you get the license code from?

If my suspicions that you torrented this then installed it on the laptop are accurate, I'd expect the school to be enraged
 
Last edited:
Hmmm Jon, really good point. I was thinking about nuking it after I read memyselfandi's post. I even know what you mean about laptops, the first time my girlfriends laptop broke I was absoultely useless. Nowadays I think people prefer to just re-install rather then spend hours fixing a virus.

Tiny7 is illegal I did say I was putting RC on it later which I did and then I was going to re-arm it 3 times until my Windows 7 comes which is 100% legal.

I havn't used torrents for 2 years, except the odd thing.

I just have to mess with things, I did with my Wii trying to mod the fan and case. That broke. I can't help it I have to try and tweak a computer and clean it up it's like an OCD. I actually enjoy formatting and re-installing everything. I'll just swap his laptop for his friends whilst he isn't looking.
 
Reinstalling is a lot easier than fixing viruses most of the time. The most productive afternoon I've spent lately was setting up an xp disk using nlite which contains the drivers for the three computers I'm responsible for along with things like windows updates, firefox and avast. Boring afternoon but well worth the investment.

I missed the bit about rc, fair enough. The issue remains that XP is quicker on such hardware though. I'm not a fan of torrents either, but it seemed a reasonable guess :)

I break things too, but fewer recently. I think its a learning process. I still rather break my own things though
 
Aayye it's good to know it's all working and you did it. Like painting your skirting boards properly, you can't see the line at the bottom but you know it's there so you gotta do it right.

Yeah I didn't really see it as damage but I guess it is, oh well lesson learned anyways! Don't mess with ANYTHING haha. Just leave stuff alone if it's working that's how all my stuff breaks. I'll be trying to mod peoples plasma TVs next and saying nope it's broke, I have to go now.

About Windows 7 on a laptop though, it's suprisngly fast. Mine uses 500MB RAM idle and it's snappy as XP. The jumplists make it so much quicker too on a netbook, very handy. Since you don't get much space estate on the screen the taskbar grouping is a life saver.
 
Nate Silvers said:
I'll just swap his laptop for his friends whilst he isn't looking.
Click to expand...

Just one comment on that...

We make note of all laptop serial numbers and who has which laptop so we would easily know if the laptop has been swapped.

Just keep that in mind incase his school does that too (which if the techs had any sense they would)
 
While I was at college, the IT tech guys placed restrictions on certain sites such as youtube/ social networking sites and anything else. We got round these problems by going into explorers proxies settings and changing a few things and the tech guys were oblivious to this. While the rest of the 800 + students didn't know how till I showed them then everyone knew how to lol..oops ok.. well maybe just those doing computing courses lol.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom