ddcmp

RTFM is the best advice i can give, ive built a few back in the days they first came out......the novelty soon wears off, i even built myself a PC filled with Vegetable Oil!!! oooh those were the days, now if i even buy a hard drive the missus goes berserk!

call it bad luck but ive used 2 nas boxes (buffalo terrastations) which both failed after a week (network card faulty) in the end the way forward for the school was a DLT V4, ive stopped recommending nas boxes until i find one that actually works longer than 5 days! - they still work (after a warranty repair) but not for backups - use them to store wsus updates and networked apps.....i think its the amout of data that gets passed on a daily basis that kills the network card.

the toolbar is ugly and too 'busy' not forgetting it sparkles! - a waste of space sparklebox on the other hand is a valuable resource which nearly all the teachers in all my schools use, if the toolbar needs to be installed for it to be free then so be it, end of the day nothings free, at least sparklebox say its for generating funds and not trying to wriggle out of it!

lol im glad to know others feel the same way, it may be usefull in some scenarios but in this school they need more managed service time not life channel - they only have half a day every two weeks and when i get in theres a million issues in the book not counting the ones where they come upto me and ask me to do certain things which they THINK will take 2 mins!

you have a few screens? this school has ONE on one side and its a fairly big school! they dont stream the standard life channel stuff (they disable that) all they show is pictures and musing done on photostory, they would have been better off paying for a clean install of the server as someone totally bodged that up (begins with E and ends with E)

One of my schools a few months ago had some guys in asking for a port to be commisioned in one of the classrooms, i asked obviously whats it for and they replied for LIFE Channel, obviously i went and double checked with teh headteacher and she said help them as required so i patched a port in and gave them the proxy. a few weeks ago i was invited to a training session for life channel, basically its a little box like the espresso box and all it does is stream video and images that the school put in via a CMS. i dont know how much the school are paying for this but im sure its a rippoff. the school didnt ask me else id say create your own videos and show them on the screen that il fit and cable for you!! right now the school are making things via photostory3 (just images) and sometimes adding mpegs/divx's which are being played on a small 40inch Plasma in a big hall (you can hardly see it from the back of the hall) do any of you have thins in your schools, apparantly life channel are quite big and are 'everywhere' (according to the rep!)

try disabling bidirectional support - this should work wonders! (im sure someone would have recommended that) - its a known issue with the drivers on this model, apparantly the printer 'talks back' to the driver automatically so doesnt need the bidirectional support to be enabled.

i have supported 3 primary schools all with winsuite, i persuaded all 3 ict coordinators to chuck winsuite out and go for AD, they have all thanked me for the advice and say that the children and the teachers all now WANT to work on the computers! get rid of winsuite and bring in AD (bang in mandatory profiles if you want) but please get rid of winsuite!