Not enough hard-disk space for temporary files

[PrintermanMike]

We've had many problems with this software, and this is the latest. I'm the support tech for a school district and as the administrator, can create and burn DVDs just fine. Teachers can as well. However, students have a more restricted level of access to prevent the little darlings from installing every game, MP3 and virus known to man on the computers in the video lab. Now the program was allowing the students to burn DVD untill a little while ago. There is plenty of disk space, so please don't tell me to check that or get a bigger hard drive. Administrators and PowerUsers can burn, so there is plenty of space. What or where is causing Users to not have enough disk space.

 

Thanks,

Mike

[gi7omy]

Usually access to the program was restricted to Administrators but as you say the students could use it until recently, so a check on what may have been installed may prove fruitful

 

Did you let the machines update with IE7 and/or Media Player 11? That could be the problem if some of the little darlings decided that 'IE7 is the latest, therefore it's cool'.

 

I used to run the computer suite in a youth club - so I know what you have to put up with

[PrintermanMike]

It looks like the last piece missing was increasing the pagefile size. Think 'unreasonably, mind-numbingly large' and that's where I set it. That and turing off hardware rendering seems to have turned the corner.

 

Thanks,

 

Mike.

[gi7omy]

No problem - I tend to use the old rule of thumb of '2.5 x RAM' as fixed min/max values.

 

I never did work out why that pagefile has to be variable anyway - my Linux one is very happy in its own fixed partition

[PrintermanMike]

That's a great big negative on IE 7 and WMP 11. Neither have been installed.

[gi7omy]

That's a great big negative on IE 7 and WMP 11. Neither have been installed.

 

A man with some sense

 

OK - check the temp folders and clear them out and also try setting the pagefile to a fixed value. I think it would be a bit superfluous for me to suggest a defrag and running chkdsk (sop in any computer that gets teenaged )

 

Can the program output to hard drive (as a .iso) instead of straight to the optical or is it failing on temp space there as well? Normally what happens in a burn is that it creates a temp file and then burns that - by writing the .iso it may bypass that (can't be sure but it's wortha try)

[gi7omy]

A thought that just hit me - I recall the little darlings getting into control panel at one time (in that case they messed up the encryption key for the wireless network - didn't see the original, just put one of their own in)

 

Would they have been playing around in System and changed the Environment Variables? That would mess up .tmp and .temp because the system wouldn't know where to put them

 

In my case, I installed tweakui for XP and hid the critical ones (you have to manually go hunt for them afterwards which is a bit of a pain, but at least it kept their grubby little fingers out)