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I didn’t know where to post this question except in the forum I hang out in the most. Please move it if it needs to be placed else where.

I have a W7 desktop. I want to buy a tablet for my better-half, who has never been interested in computers, and is “tech-phobic.”

Recently she indicated an interest in learning, so she could use email, and communicate with friends.

I would appreciate any recommendations regarding a tablet, and also any suggestions from those who have helped a non-computer type person to feel comfortable in using same.

Thanks for any help you can provide,
Dick

I know you wanted recommendations on a tablet, however why not get her a smartphone (Samsung Galaxy, iPhone, etc) and have her use that to practice with email and chatting with friends face to face using the phones chatting app or downloading one for free. She could download her respective email app (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc) and start emailing away. She can talk and send email at the same time if you have AT&T. If screen size is a concern, get a bigger smartphone for her. That way she don’t have to carry two devices and she could practice anywhere she goes.

When I did system imaging….we use to create a base image that could be used for all devices, even dissimilar devices. We downloaded all the drivers for each dissimilar device and put it on the image say C:delldrivers folder. Once we loaded the image on the machine, we just simply installed the drivers for that device. If you have many dissimilar devices, say 5 or more, this might be an option for you. If less, consider creating an image for each dissimilar device and restore when needed (which saves you the time of re-installing the drivers in the future). It’s good to plan ahead and assess whether it makes sense to create a base image with all the drivers or a unique image for each dissimilar device. We used Acronis Snap Deploy to capture the image and then deploy the image to many machines simultaneously. See here for Acronis imaging options: http://www.acronis.com/en-us/#.

Good luck.

Thanks for the tips RG.

Server is a Dell Poweredge T110 II Intel I3 2120 3.3Ghz 8gb RAM, 24p gigabit switch

The applications are not installed on the clients but directly run from the server. The files and large zip files for transfer or consulting are also located on the server itself.

Thanks

This is an old thread but did you try clearing the cache on the client PC’s? You said you open a lot of documents, trying deleting the temp files cache.

I just wanted to follow-up with a final with this thread I opened. I talked with a Dell engineer and this is what they said from a previous case they had about this issue. The CD-rom drive will not be able to be removed in the F12 Bios menu. They said to implement a administrator password in the BIOS so that anyone booting from CD will need to insert a password. So this will have to do. One final note though, on a Dell Optiplex 790 I tested the CDROM entry is removed from the F12 menu with BIOS admin password whereas on the Dell 745 and 780 it is not.

Mpioso,

Thanks for your reply. I did some more research and it seems to point to burning a custom bios. I have no idea how to do this so I’ll be doing more research. Are there tools you recommend to do this or any instructions? This seems like the way to go. Removing the jumper pins sounds like a good idea as well. Thanks again.

I appreciate your suggestions…thank you. I did contact Dell but no resolution came about. I’ll keep researching but thanks for your suggestions.

We are trying to implement this on all machines in the environment and not just one PC so that virtual option might be out of the question. There has to be some Bios software editor that allows me to remove the entry. Here’s what I want it to look like when the user hits F12 when booting up. The CD-rom drive is disabled in the BIOS. How can we get it to look like this without disabling the CD-rom drive in the BIOS.

31985-Bootmenu2

I reedited my post. Option 2 is a workaround but someone can easily reset the bios/cmos jumper and the password would be wiped.

Thanks for your suggestion. The OneNote is a great suggestion and I did try that.

You can try this to see if it helps. Go to your Network Connections area in Control Panel. Right click your LAN>properties>Internet Protocol TCP/IP>Advanced Tab. Make sure their are no DNS Suffixes applied. Or you can compare the settings with the good working computer/account to the one not working and see if the settings differ.

other stuff to try: open cmd prompt> IPconfig /flushdns.

Good luck.

Thanks for the reply. I am using MS word as the default editor for Outlook 2002. Everything looks fine if i send the email to another user in the company but when it is sent to a gmail user the format (fonts) are different and not all one standard font, like Times New Roman. Some characters show up in Arial, when it should all be Times New Roman.

Hi Hans,

Thanks for your reply. I tried opening the Excel documents in Windows Explorer but it kept on defaulting to Excel 2007. It didn’t matter which Excel version i opened up first, it would just open all spreasheets in 2007. The shortcuts on the desktop may be my only solution. The user will have to open up Excel 2002 and then browse for the document if the user wants to work in Excel 2002. Same goes for Excel 2007. I also tried your suggestion of placing the shortcuts into the “SendTO” folder; but after placing the shortcuts in that folder and right clicking on an Excel spreadsheet, there was no listing for any of the Excel versions. They were in the SendTo folder, but they did not show up in the SendTo command.

Another thought is that the user receives a lot of Excel attachments in Outlook, and everytime the user opens it, it will open in Excel 2007 instead of Excel 2002. I guess the user will have to save the document first before viewing it and then open up Excel 2002 and then browse for the file. Thanks for your suggestions, i really appreciate it. If you have any other ideas, please let me know.