sidewinder

Ah yes, I forgot about the #1 reason why I prefer working here - lunch (and it is decent food) provided free every day

To be honest, while it is technically illegal, just do it if you want to play them on your PC. You arnt going to get raided by the police for downloading some ROMS. It only comes down to how you feel morally really, and considering you already own the games in legal formats I'm guessing you wouldn't feel too guilty.

Money certainly isn't too short where I work, but theres not so much sloshing around that it's wasted either. Quite a nice balance IMO - Plenty of cash to improve things but no massive pots of money that have to be spent on 'something, anything' either which is what wound me up about the state school I worked at - money was always being wasted on unnecessary crap just because it had to be used Classes are usually 18-20 pupils here, so yeah smaller classes definately

I work at a fairly small school, around 110 computers over 3 sites. Being old buildings though, the cabling is a bit of a state. I've worked out loads since I arrived, but without test equipment, finishing the job is going to be difficult. At my old school, as it was huge, buying something high end like a Test-um Validator wasn't an issue. I'd love to get one here but not sure I can justify it? It of course does give me the ability to map and certify every point on the network, something an outside company would charge a fair bit for, and it would also allow me to run some new points myself in the future, saving using an external company (or in our case, our electrician...not a situation I'm overly happy with) and potentially saving money. My other option is to go for something like this: LanScaper Kit which we had at my old place too, and was my preferred device for quick testing (mainly due to it being quick to power up and find where a cable goes) But it isnt as sophisticated as the Test-Um, and wouldn't allow me to properly certify every point. Is there anything in the middle, cost and feature wise, or do I have enough justification to request we buy a Test-Um Validator?

I work in a prep school and can echo everything Elsie has said. Especially the part about the bursar - that was the biggest shock for me when I came from a state school, although the bursar is important in state, in private the only person with (slightly) more power is the head! Also the bursar may well be your line manager if you get the job, which from my experiance doesn't happen so much in state schools, so if they are in the interview make sure you mention how much value for money you can give the school!

On Monday we had a problem (think it was down to Hyper-V and its MAC address assignment) which meant our main DC/DNS/DHCP was acting up and no DNS was working properly. So as we have a backup DC (plus a 3rd on another site) I just installed DHCP on that one, and we've been running without the main one since. Now want to bring it back online, mainly because it has most of the FSMO roles assigned to it. So am I likely to run into any problems just switching it on again? AD - will there be any lasting problems with not having the DC with most FSMO roles online for a few days? DNS - When I bring the main one back up, it's going to have out of date DNS records. Will it sync with the others or is it likely to poison the DNS database with old records? Would it be easier to just delete the zone on the offline server and then setup DNS again on it?

Not a fan of either but that is an awesome goal to be fair

I get different laptops depending on what they require, but even the one bought for our new head (had to be 'high spec') came in at £600ish all in Rest are circa £500

Excellent, confirms my suspicions then! Thanks for the script example, very helpful. I hate the web interface but never have time to learn the CLI properly, especially as we only have a couple

We have 2x 4500G switches here. Over the weekend, for some reason they lost all their settings related to fibre ports being enabled and link aggregation, but all other settings were fine. Been racking my brain all day, and all I can think of is that all the settings that were lost, were recent changes, and seeing the 'Save configuration' button on the web interface makes me wonder whether settings will only take effect until power-off unless config is written to the switch? And we possibly had a brief powercut over the weekend. I'm used to configuring HP switches and as far as I can remember you don't need to do this, hence why it has only just occurred to me.

Yeah, what happened to: "This article will be updated soon with information about what we have found and what we have done to prevent similar things happening again." Still not been updated! Not expecting explicit details for obvious reasons but I'm just interested

Ooh I was tempted to buy these a few weeks ago, glad I waited, bargain! I like the image that comes up if you enter an amount under $1 (I have paid more than that!!)

Nice one, sounds like you got a good deal. Prices for Wii's have plummeted, it's not even worth me trying to sell mine anymore, especially as I don't have any big accessories

Ordered a replacement drum paddle for our washing machine last night, that was the most boring for me in quite a while

Have to say, I wouldn't consider jailbreaking to be an iOS specific term either. It is overwhelmingly used to refer to Apple jailbreaks, but as a general term I'd class rooting an Android phone as jailbreaking too

I'll do a full scan and see what it says. Yeah it is pretty much the worst time for a hard disk failure! It is in warranty but a) I'm assuming hard disks arnt covered with laptops and b) even if they are I'd probably be waiting a long time for a replacement

My work laptop has been playing up big time the last few weeks. What happens is, Windows starts up normally, everything works for a few minutes, and then you'll open something and that program will hang, followed by everything else, eventually it needs to be forcefully powered off. On bootup again, checking the event log there will be quite a few atapi errors - "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0" Normally when I see anything like that, coupled with freezes, I know it is probably the hard disk dying. However in this case, I can use the laptop in safe mode with no problems - indeed I have had it on for about 4 hours today and its fine, it only ever crashes when booted up normally. I've updated and reinstalled SATA controller drivers, chipset drivers, everything I can think of. There is quite a lot of information about this error online, but mostly the solution seems to be a dodgy SATA cable, or 2 devices on the same port. In this case, being a laptop, it isnt (ive taken the hard disk out to check it though) The fact it NEVER crashes in safe mode points to a driver to me rather than a failing disk? Reinstalling Windows will be my next option but I'd like to avoid it if possible! Its a Toshiba Satellite Pro S500 with Windows 7 Enterprise SP1. Any ideas?

That is what doesn't work, as I mentioned in the first line of my post...

This isn't a huge issue, but its a bit strange. The shortcuts for orientating a board - either pressing the mouse and keyboard buttons on the board together or pressing the help button then orient, do not work for teachers since I changed the network over the summer. It only works for me, and thus I assume local admins. Clicking the taskbar icon and then clicking orient does work, but not all the teachers know this, and it's quicker to do it the other ways. I've tried giving them full access to C:/Program Files/Smart/ and I'm sure I've tried the registry key too, but to no avail. Any ideas?

Almost always get petrol from Asda now as they are always cheapest. Notice the difference going back to my parents, Sainsburys, which I always thought was cheap, is at least 2-3p more Where should the cheapest fuel be? I always thought it should be cheaper in larger towns/cities because of more competition, but that certainly doesnt seem to be the case in London

I went to Vietnam this January, it was so unusual going away to somewhere so hot from so cold...suffered with heatstroke a bit which may have been related but it was definately worth it. Probably a bit far for a week though

Do you not get a say in it?

That's ok then. Yes in most cases the mount needs to be at least moved or changed, since our older projectors are usually half a mile back, ridiculously low or just in completely the wrong place (a lot were done before I arrived and the phrase bodge job comes to mind) I've used the company before a few times and have always been extremely happy with the work, so no problem with the quality, just wondered about price. Also, yes I quite like not being liable if a projector falls off the ceiling!

Got a quote from a supplier we've used before for a new projector + new cabling + fitting, and given their quote I would essentially be paying around £250 for the cables and installation. Is that reasonable? In some cases I could do the actual projector swap myself, but the cabling and wallplates here are very tatty/haphazard hence why I like the lot replaced.

They take 5% from each donation, though to be fair whenever I've used it I'm sure this has always been pointed out, and the charities are happy to use the service as it makes donating easier