[EVERYBODY -- Some points raised by Patrick and responded to here are of interest at other CUIP/NSP schools besides the one he works at.  You're all welcome to read and write to this thread.]


Hi, Patrick,

Thanks for getting the Reporting Blog off to a good start for spring quarter!

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We do have some canned air supply again; Russ or I can bring some to Ray.

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I heartily agree with your point that the partition setup on many of these CPS images (or manufacturer's defaults) is just silly -- the small C: fills up early and the large D: goes mostly unused.  I tend to distrust those boot-time dynamic re-partitioning programs, of the kind that don't actually change the partition table, but if it seems to be working well for you, that's great.  The other half of the problem is that program installations and user files end up in small C: drive by default -- we can be aware of this and try to do after-fit program installs onto D:, but it would be better, as you suggest, to divvy up the space better in the first place.  

BTW, at Ray as well as some other of our schools, such as Woodlawn and Harte, a big culprit in eating up space is the Server Offline Files system (those annoying "synchronizing files" popup windows that show up to slow you down when trying to log off).  That might as well be turned off; everybody fnds them so annoying anyway.  Instructions for that (in XP terms, but W7 is not too dfferent) are embedded within a more-general discussion on our Wiki of how to reclaim wasted file space (which I might repost as a Tech Tip since we have a different group of people).  The note is at 

http://cuiptech.wikispaces.com/PC+maint+full+drive

 -- if there are volunteers to edit that into more useful shape, hallelujah, just let me know. 

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Yes, setting a teacher's CPS (INSTR or ADMIN domain) login to be a local Administrator on their own classroom computer (and possibly the students computers in their rooms) is something we can and will do.  [Eduardo -- this was what we were doing with that laptop with the phonics program.]  

There are a couple aspects of this that bear watching, however, and I'll hope to discuss them with you more fully in person at Ray some afternoon this week.  In brief:

1. Not to get into school politics, but it's a good idea to check out this step for a particular teacher  with your CUIP TRA and (if there is one) the school techco -- thus at Ray I mean Russ and Ms. Cobb.  We want to avoid assigning admin rights to a teacher who might be out of their depth technically, and later inadvertently cause problems; or more rarely, a teacher who has the technical competence but may not respect CPS policies ["I don't like McAfee, I'm going to remove it and install AVG"] or their colleague the school techco, or CUIP and our personnel.  

There is a pretty easy formula to decline doing that -- "Oh, I'd be glad to install your program / printer for you!"  

2.  Technical point -- though it certainly depends on policy in a general or abstract way, the way we've found to make it work best is not literally thru editing "Local Security Policy".  Rather it's just a matter of adding the teacher's CPS identity to the local Administrators group [which can hold as members local users, domain users, and domain groups].
   In turn, there are two methods for adding a domain user to a local group -- going thru the Manage Console is more laborious but checks everything and thus is something you can be confident will work later when they sign on; or thru the User Accounts Control Panel, which is quicker and simpler, because it does not immediately verify the account name. 

Thanks for raising these interesting topics!

  ==Mitch