synaesthesia

You would think that standardisation of some technology/terminology would or should help - after all, most MIS speak the same language when it comes to sending information to the government and eachother, so it shouldn't be too much out of the way for a SIMS data manager to change from one to the other. Like anything, there may be a difference in basic terms, interface and what not but a register is still a register, a CTF is still a CTF and the data is still data. Being held to ransom for the sake of "being used to something" isn't an excuse, otherwise we'd be languishing with crap wooden houses, leaded petrol in our cars and drinks bottles you can only open with a bottle opener.

We had a very similar issue when putting in our new Aruba wireless system, and the issue turned out to be firmware on the AP's themselves. We'd gotten around it temporarily by forcing the laptops (via drivers) to connect to 5Ghz only as for whatever reason 2.4 wasn't playing ball in exactly the same way as you describe.

Don't feel too bad - I don't think anyone here is taking the digs specifically at you, but we have mostly all become cynical and jaded with regards to Capita's offerings. I know many people who do or did work for Capita and some of them are the brightest minds in the game, people I'd go to for advice before anyone else on the planet. They're not the issue, the individuals rarely are but the boundaries they're met with working for corporations like Capita however are the problem. We as a whole only want what's best for our schools and you don't need to be technical to know who Capita are in education and aware of what a pain they can be as a whole to deal with. Data managers, exams organisers, timetablers for example across the country all have a special eye roll for when the C word is mentioned!

Only just noticed you dropped the P bomb in there. Are you aware of just how well loved Pearson is in the educational IT community? We'd rather sell our souls to Capita!

Capita have grown mostly by swallowing up smaller companies already established in their fields. I worked for a branch of Capita ESS which was originally part of the local LEA and was massively successful to the point that their kit and/or expertise was seen in nearly every school throughout the county and thousands beyond; they had a great reputation which was well deserved. Then Capita swallowed them up, corporatisation hit them like a ton of bricks and before you know it the core values the team had were being shot down by profiteering and low moral standards just to keep the board happy. Both clients and staff left in droves (those that were not forced out). This sentiment echoed through most similar branches of the company that had been acquired and it showed, it was a horrible company to work for and most of us ended up feeling like oysters waiting to be shucked. And now for schools at least, so many appear to be stuck with SIMS and the idea of change is a daunting one but hopefully that tide is turning quickly enough now that most schools know another school that's jumped ship and hasn't had problems. I'm looking forward to that day, perhaps with a little trepidation but it must be worth it.

OK, so a little more digging shows it's a refreshed Dali architecture chip which, if anything would make it suprisingly *overpowered* - geared more towards basic mobile gaming than education workhorse. Certainly way beyond those Celerons and puts them into refurbished Core i3/mobile i5 levels (better than an i5 5300u, plus being an APU able to do decent mobile gaming). Think I'm even more confused now!

Intune would definitely be the way to go so you can manage them remotely enough to ensure they don't go walkabouts.

Think I might have got myself confused - that bench was from the 300e chromebooks. I know there's less overhead on those but I bet 90% of schools have thrown away better hardware that would have been far quicker with a £15 SSD thrown in. Asked a couple of friends in the channel and info the Pollock architecture hardware seems few and far between - I question it's existence still based entirely on the fact that SOMEONE must have used one on the internet and therefore performance metrics, processor IDs etc would have been made available to the wider internet almost instantly (loads of services do this, but any gaming service like Origin, Steam do this automatically, some browser plugins, most OEM preinstall software from Dell, Lenovo etc). Tis a strange one and I'll keep digging.

As those processors don't exist, and Lenovo don't list the 100e with anything other than Intel processors I would be questioning the specs of those! ** Edit - found an updated list. Processor itself isn't yet named but found in a lot of chinese no-names and these are brand new models. Passmark performance ranks them as about equal with the OLD dual core Pentiums.

Ah, the product of a well thought out plan by a government backed provider who really wasn't being paid enough to care about end users! And look at the speed of those celerons. They barely hold a candle to the last AMD X2 processors we have a few of floating around still!

Depends on the game. My 1TB nvme games drive is full - GTAV, RDR2, Battlefront2, Last Jedi, Witcher 3 and a couple of the Borderlands games. They're only getting bigger - assuming higher texture qualities used too (I imagine PS5 would be similar in size to PC for that). And yeah, I think the diskless is 2TB and disk is 1TB but even so, the games still need installing and don't run from disk ever.

The bluray drives used in those new devices (xb1s, ps4, ps5) is far nearer laptop end - you're talking £20 for a typical laptop drive compared to 70-80 for desktop type you got in the xbox 360 and original xb1. Still, the one bad thing they can't seem to shake off is storage. 1TB? That's 4-5 AAA games. Unless their hedging bets on future streaming services, you can also add an external drive to that bulk so you can actually have a reasonable array of games ready to play.

Is that right? All the documentation say the devices belong to the school after the students have left...

Like iPads (bearing in mind I'm the world's biggest AntiApple person this side of Louis Rossman) with the right use they can be worth their weight in gold.

Then you have all the booking them, hoping you're lucky it's a nice day and there's not something going on, the cost, the lack of spontaneity and availability. You could also think a little outside your own school perhaps - can you do it for others, if even for your MAT.

We've been looking at this for a little while, mostly for marketing/PR purposes and would no doubt serve many uses for maintenance and high level inspection. It would be controlled by the IT department who would be licensed and trained. There's a few things worth a bit of money these days on the PR side of things - good photographic equipment and good use of social media.

Didn't dig that deep into it - unless that guidance contains the BIOS password through it'd be fairly moot!

I hope that isn't going to be the same across the board... they're making it clear that support will be down to the school IT departments yet basically stopping them from being managed properly by them? Under any other circumstances I'd be sending them back and telling them to mug someone else off!

It's bloody awful - our site team "use" it for site management, but now it's barely acknowledged as a waste of time and money. Clunky, slow, best avoided IMO - plenty of better ones out there. We're still on OSTicket and it's just so easy.

My kit turned up on Saturday - there was a large delay on getting the 3300x in so opted to change it out for a 3600 instead. Not disappointed Only downside is the AsRock motherboard I opted for - what a crock! Assumed as they were getting so popular these days it wouldn't hurt to give them a go. Website, documentation, drivers - all laughable and the RAID system on the boards is diabolical. Will stick with it a while before changing out for something decent. Still, performance is a very noticable increase even from my i5 4690.

Same as anything - return for refund or replacement, not that I've ever had that.

This is pretty much where we are - having blocked the use of Zoom immediately after the issues came to light, we've had very little issue or backlash - we've made it clear that if it's for discussion of general things and not specific/PII then fine, on your own back as if it was a personal use but otherwise we have teams for that very purpose. Not saying Teams is absolutely safe, nothing is but because it's licensed/paid for by the school as part of the 365 service we do have some legal comeback if something did go wrong.

*facepalms* After all that, and people are still using on mass in schools? Has there been clarity provided on security since the issues please?

Generally those products all use MIB which I believe is usually SNMP based and yes, Unifi supports those fully - I've had our old UniFi system set up with the old Procurve platform (was it PCM?) before without any problems or drawbacks other than being more basic than the manufacturers own tools, but that goes for any manufacturer.

Sounds like some schools are probably thinking about this the wrong way (probably because none of us can be right in these times!) Technology shouldn't be the center of this period of teaching, in fact you could easily do it without turning on any device other than a lightswitch.