CD Drive Elastic Bands

[thom]

I'm sure this must be a common problem but I have yet to find a solution.

 

Kids are constanly pulling elastic bands out of the CD/DVD drives in school. This renders the drive useless and i can't find anywhere to buy replacements.

 

Are all the bands a standard size?

 

They must be dirt cheap but where can i buy a box of 100 from?

[ninjabeaver]

The solution we had was to remove all the CD-ROM drives. Not the answer you was looking for by a long shot I know, but it was part of the crack down on vandalism in the ICT Suites.

 

It's also another method of stopping the little darlings from ripping CD music to their home folders.

 

Have you tried contacting the actual drive manufacturer at all?

[Geoff]

You also might want to think about putting cameras in the rooms to catch the little blighters at it.

[beeswax]

this is still a problem for us as well. when we bought a whole load of new machines recently they all came with dvd re-writers (we didn't ask for them, but our supplier had quoted us a price and by the time he had taken delivery of the machines the price he was charged had dropped, so he threw in the dvd re-writers) and we knew they'd be damaged if left in the machines. so we removed them and temporarily put in an extra blanking plate, with a few spots of super glue so that they wouldn't be punched in. the upshot was that we got a call from one of the it suites the following day that one of the machines wouldn't start. on investigation, the blanking plates had been punched in, and someone had reached in and stolen the memory.

que sera, sera.

[tarquel]

Best solution is to have the whole pc's out of sight of the pupils/staff/everyone.

 

Not expensive either - a few cheap cupboards (and a good lock on each one) with the backs knocked out (providing the backs are going to be against the wall lol) and some ps/2 & vga extension leads (usb extension leads if youre gonna be allowing USB pen devices and audio extension leads if your gonna have speakers/headphones attached to the side of the monitors or something) and some 4/6-way power extension blocks (or whatever they are called) and you are laughing

 

Works for me - the systems just run and they cant do bugger all to mess them up - GP permitting

 

[i might post the pics some day ]

 

Regards

N.

[british-wave]

We have the same problem here. One thing we have done here is just take the power cable out of the back o fthe CD rom drive. Stops them being able to open the drives and they still act a blanking plate. Bit of an expensive solution I know but better than memory being knicked.

 

Most of the drives we have got recently are cogs inside rather than bands but I wonder how long it will be befoer they stop working!!

[Geoff]

We have the same problem here. One thing we have done here is just take the power cable out of the back o fthe CD rom drive. Stops them being able to open the drives and they still act a blanking plate.

 

No it doesn't. You can just stick a bent paper clip in the manual release (small hole in the facia under the drive tray, usually near the eject button).

[british-wave]

Kids tend not to have paper clips on them at this school.

 

If it easnt easy for them then they wont bother. Putting somthing in to release the drawer is too much hassle.

[Guest metalmonkey]

We had this exact issue with kids flicking the bands out of the cd drive.

 

We bought from our local post office the smalled elastic bands we could find to replace them (those that wasnt found in the back of the cd drive!) and this worked. They were no bigger than a 5 pence piece. The kicks got bored of flicking them off when we kept replacing them.

[ICTNUT]

We have done the same as ninjabeaver there is no real reason for them to have them and all new PC's that will be purchased from here on in will not have CD'd or floppies in them.

 

As we RIS and GPO install software theres no need for it and make s the PC just that little bit more cheaper.

 

If however we need to manually install simply attach that nice new sparkly CD drive that you have in your office and away you go.

 

To date i have yet to fond anywhere where you can get the bands and I don't think there is a standard either.

[Geoff]

Ok, thats great but what do ypu do about USB pen drives. Yu can explode the USB interface with a well aimed paper clip you know...

[ICTNUT]

Geoff,

 

I am aware about the USB ports, but to date we have not had any issues.

[mac_shinobi]

Ok, thats great but what do ypu do about USB pen drives. Yu can explode the USB interface with a well aimed paper clip you know...

 

Feel free to send them to me if you like lol

[OverWorked]

I agree with ICTNUT. Every PC I've bought in the past 2 years has no laptop or optical drives (I always specify that). I just make sure the machines are PXE bootable so I can use RIS to set the up.

 

So far I haven't found a reason for installing floppy or optical drives in pupils' machines. They never use them anyway, just vandalise them!

 

If they do want to access something from a CD, I copy it to a share and put a link on the start menu.

[thom]

Well, from the amount of views this post has had we obviously need to find an answer to the orginal question.

 

Thanks to MetalMonkey who gave the suggestion of using normal tiny elastic bands. Although i'm a bit worried of how long they will last. Still a good answer for the short term.

 

The fact is not to do with how I can get around working without a CD drive it is for the studnets in music burning their latest tracks and for media studies creating DVDs to add to their showreel or show family and for a cheap way for staff to copy presentations and most of all give the users something familiar to their home pcs (if lucky enough to own one) and try to make every PC similarly accessible to any of the technophobes that dares to use the technlogy.

 

Please post solutions like MetalMonkey not alternatives.

[Geoff]

How about having a few external USB CDRW's that you could loan out to kids/staff? At least if they got broke you'd know who to send the bill to.

[Joanne]

I've brought this up again because I'm sick of the kids doing this!! On some machines it actually slows them down because they are constantly trying to check the cd drive.

 

Also today i found a penny in a drive... how or why is another question.

 

Might try the small 'laccy bands... but i'd prolly just be doing that forever.

 

I wish the children were better supervised and then things like this wouldn't happen.

 

However, I've never seen anything been stolen from the inside of a computer even if the plates have been compromised!!

[beeswax]

Sadly, with the current price of CD/DVD drives, and the amount of time it takes to get an elastic band in place, you have to wonder which is more cost effective and time-efficient.

[Sylv3r]

I now purchase PC's without the optical drives in them. Unless they is a reason for your machines having them I would replace them with blanking plates as discussed.

 

The only machines I have with Optical drives are the Teacher PC's connected to the IWB's.

[PeterW]

I wish the children were better supervised and then things like this wouldn't happen.

 

I think we have a winner!

 

But yes common solutions seem to be;-

 

Not to buy optical drives

Customer removes power from the drive

 

Coins in the drives don't happen often but when they do sometimes I have seen them short on the IDE interface and actually prevent the PC from posting.

 

Yu can explode the USB interface with a well aimed paper clip you know...

 

Indeed also with USB internal card readers those compact flash slots are just dying out for some little darling to stick thier front door key into and take out the card reader and/or mainboard (I have a nice picture of a mainboard with a blown USB controller where a child has attacked the card reader:mad:) Funnily enough it mainly happens for this particular customer in thier library area with the PC's in the classrooms not being touched.

[TronXP]

We bought CD-ROMs that had cogs and not band driven. Was a pain to find them, but saves the hassle of the bands going missing. So far no problem with USB ports

[flashsnaps]

We just buy them with out - really can't see why they would need a drive, when they can use a usb stick. Only teacher machines have drives.

[Sirbendy]

we don't fit them to "own build" machines we deploy, but for Dells etc that ship with them, yes..I pull the power. The kids are too dense to think of a paperclip..and I swear none of them even know what the manual release is.

 

As to rubber bands..heh. I used to have to replace them on Amstrads 3 inch drives..what fun.

[ranj]

We had all sorts of vandalism in our school, because all of our ICT rooms are quite close to each other, we came up with an idea to use one large unused office and build that into a data centre where we rack mounted all of our PCs into 2u racks (not citrix clients but proper intel machines). As large runs of cables were required we used PS2/USB/VGA over cat5 to send the signal these long distances.

 

It is a higher cost because you got to factor in these cat5 extenders, racks and all associated equipment, air conditioning as well but because all your PCs are central in one area you will find you have less issues with the equipment and all pupils see on their desk is a flat screen, ps2 mice and kb and usb port. The benefit is cables cannot be seen with this solution and the secure TFT mount will hide the cables. we purchased tft mounts from a company called Toptec.

 

It has cut our maintenance costs by replacing 2/3 mice a month (previously this would have been about 20/30 mice) and it is a really tidy solution, and if you have an IT room where it gets really hot, this makes a drastic difference as your PCs are not in the same room and TFTs generate really low heat so you staff and pupils dont get too uncomfortable.

 

It works really great for us. Touch wood we have not had an air conditioning failure but if that happened that would cause a slight inconvienance, but nowadays you get a temporary solution and hire an airconditioner in a number of hours. We have 4 IT rooms and the library running throiugh our data centre and it works a treat. This solution was built on the top floor of our school but we can still send these cat5 cables down to the ground floor. You can basically send it a maximum of 90m.

 

We guarantee that all PCs are operational with this solution to the teachers and so far (its been in place for 4 years) its worked really well. We have 2 backup rack machines so if one fails, the technician can swop it in an instance and then take the failed machine away for maintenance.

 

Would recommend it to anyone especially if you have issues with vandalism, IT rooms getting warm, IT teams wanting centralised management of their machines. You can pull machines out the racks to do maintenance which makes it far easier as well.

 

I am happy to send some pictures if required. I can even put you in touch with company who did the installation for us. They are based in Bham. I am hoping once our new school website is complete I can put some pictures on there.

 

It be good actually if any other school have done this type of solution.

[dfinney695]

We looked into the elastic band idea and it seems No8's are a good match but you might want to go smaller as there is a good bit of stretch in elastic bands, also No12's are hard to come buy in NI anyway. Edited September 15, 2009 by dfinney695