PrimaryTech

Hi All, Our reception teacher is looking for a tablet to use for assessment. What she wants to do is open up a pro-forma word document, edit text, take pictures with the tablets camera (it must have a rearward camera) and insert these into the document. Is this as simple as it sounds? Any recommmendation for a good Windows tablet that will do this? I'm going for Windows as it's the easiest thing to connect to a domain but I'm easy with alternatives like Android or iOS. Any help gratefully received

Hi all, I need a remote for an Epson EMP-51 projector :0 Annoyingly we put it up in the hall and there is no button on the projector to access the menu, so the image is upside down There's 5 shiny pounds (+p&p) for anyone who can help!

Hi there, Our hall projector has just gone and I'm looking for an local (Cornwall) company to supply and install a new one, any recommendations?

Hi all, Our school is looking to get some stage lighting but I don't know of any suppliers in Cornwall and know little of production sound and lighting (apparently this falls under my remit ). All I know is that we would like 4-6 LED par cans and a lighting mixer. Any advice or recommendations gratefully received, I know this isn't stictly IT but I don't know who else to ask!

That's what I was thinking A 20 minute restore to a VM should the server suffer a fault where a normal restore can't be done (Fire, Theft, PSU or HDD failure which requires an OEM part on backorder) I did make a VM and got it to boot the S2k8 DVD but stopped at the point where it was looking for a backup (It was late!) so If I can get the VM to see the hdd with the backup on then hopefully it'll boot! I'll let you know how I get on.

Hi All, Currently I'm backing up a small server using Windows Server Backup, it creates a VHD for each partition and I can mount each one in Windows 7 Pro if I need to restore a file, happy days I'm wondering if I can use those VHD's to create a Virtual Machine of the server running on a Windows 7 Pro host? So far I've tried to create a virtual machine, adding each VHD as a hard disk in VirtualPC settings but I keep getting "Insert suitable media" messages Any help gratefully received

The ks1 teachers love it, KS2 not so much. It integrates well with vles and staff can access resources from home. The one thing I begrudge is the maintenance charge, £250 per year. The idea of having a cache box to download stuff at night was genius. 15 years ago. Now with improved broadband it seems a little pointless. Though the boxes are super resiliant, only thing ive never had to fix!

Cheers guys, Did all three of those things and now Espresso is running fine on IE9 (saves me having to roll them all back to IE8)

Yes we do have Sophos anti-virus, if you could dig out the fix that would be great! Flash player is all up-to-date. Thanks for the quick responses!

Hi all, I've recently upgraded our Vista machines to IE9 and since then I can't access Espresso content. Espresso still works fine on IE8 and Firefox, just not on IE9. So far I've: Added that latest inetres.adm to group policy for all machines and users Made sure that emd is on the proxy bypass list Restarted the espresso box Has anyone else had similar issues? In IE9 i can see main espresso page but when I click on an item I can the image of the boy and dog saying 'please wait' and nothing happens Any help gratefully received!

Hi all, At my school we have two buildings about 5 metres apart that have a 10M fibre connection between them (Slooooooow) and I've just scavenged a couple of 54M access points from a nearby school. If I set the 2 access points up as a wireless bridge between the 2 buildings will I see significant speed increases? Currently we only have a couple of teachers working in the secondary building and the 10M is fine, but I've started to use Windows Server Backup to backup or SIMS server to VHD's held in the second building and a 22GB backup is taking nearly 9 hours

Yep it was the SIMS.ini in C:\Windows, cheers guys, all is running well now

*facepalm* That'll be it (hopefully). Is there anything In C:\windows for FMS? I've changed the FMSconnect.ini in \Program files\sims\FMS because that was coded for the old server.

Hi all, I've just migrated our SIMS.net to a new server and on the server I can open SIMS and FMS absolutely fine, really quick and snappy (a huge leap on our 8yo SIMS server). However, on the workstations SIMSLOAD takes ages to complete and once you've put in your credentials it takes another significant amount of time to come up with the SIMS application. Once it's loaded it works fine, reports take no time at all, it just takes ages to load initially. I've changed the connect.ini on S:\SIMS to ServerName=\sims2008 DatabaseName=Sims and on the workstations the connect.ini redirects to S:\sims Is there something else I should have changed? The S Drive has been remapped to the new server so I'm stumped as to why it's taking so long to load

I've looking to purchase a birdbox camera for our school but I'm stuggling to find one that has all the things I need. It must have: Wireless with receiver range up to 25 metres Battery power supply (box is 20m from nearest power supply) Ability to stream video to a web server OR capture frames that I can upload via FTP I'm looking at units like this Wireless Day / Night camera with USB receiver Any advise would be great, AV isn't really my thing

Cheers for the detailed response guys. To flesh it out the server would be just running SIMS, I have a seperate DC for AD, file server etc. There are never more that 3 concurrent connections, myself, Receptionist and Secretary. Receptionist uses SIMS for attendance, contact details and a few reports, Secretary runs reports and does all the FMS stuff and I do updates, adding/removing pupils. Our current SIMS server is backed up to a NAS each night using Windows Server Backup (mounting a VHD and restoring the SQL database is so much less painless than the tapes we used to use) Looking at the majority of responses we'll need to get a decent mid-range server, we are running SQL 2008 Express so I'll need to check the limitations, our DB's are 520MB SIMS, 200 FMS.

We're due a new SIMS.net server and I was wonding if anyone has used / is using one of these little boxes: HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer - £100.. | Ebuyer.com We are a primary school and we only use SIMS for the basics (attendance, assessment and FMS), never more than 3 simultaneous connections. I've checked the SIMS.net min spec and it says 3Ghz so it's down on CPU but it will be upgraded to 4GB RAM and an extra 2 HDD's (1st drive - O/S, 2nd Drive -SIMS, FMS and MS Office, 3rd Drive - Backup) Gotta be better than our 8yo Viglen server with 2GB ram and 2 (very clicky) SCSI drives?

Hi all, We are a Primary School with SWGfL as our ISP. We seem to be having issues with downloading data, currently I'm downloading a application and the download box is showing ~20KB/Sec. [Edit: finished, attached is screenshot] It took 2.5 hours yesterday to download a 200MB ISO. I've done tests on the LAN between all the switches we have in place (3, all 100MB) and I'm getting 45MB Write / 75MB read which I'm happy enough with. I'm not really sure what download speeds I should be achieving, if anyone else in the SWGfL area can give me a comparable speed that would be great. Specifically in the mid-Cornwall area. Any suggestions on the next steps to sorting this are also gratefully received, I contacted SWGfL and they say that our connection looks good so I'm a bit stumped

Hi all, I'm looking to set up a secure VPN so that staff can access thier school documents folder from home. I have experience of setting up VPN's as I did one at a previous school I worked at, though (against my advise) they had the DC as the VPN server. I'm looking to set up a box in between our DC and router to allow staff to connect and then access their documents. Is it best to have a XP/2003/2008 installed on the box and lock it down or is there a linux alternative? Any help would be greatfully received

I'll have a look, I think a K-lite codec pack might be installed as with have several camcorders with different recording formats...

Hi all, A couple of days ago a colleague said that when she opened a folder of pictures and clicked on the 'View as Slideshow' button on the left of the window it took ten to twenty seconds to generate the first image, then crashed after 4 or 5 images. I've since discovered that this happens on all our teachers' class machines (XP SP3). Pictures are stored on our server but opening other files, such as video clips, works as expected so I don't think it's a network issue. Any other suggestions greatfully received!

As per the title really, I'm looking into Google Apps for Education for a school I support and wondered if there were any primaries that have implemented it, specifically in the South West?

Cheers for the help guys, went with protect my bubble in the end, £3.99pm.

Hi all, A personal one here, I've recently had the displeasure of dropping my HTC Desire Z and having the screen replaced (Home insurance was £250 excess, Carphone Warehouse wanted £170, went direct to HTC and they did it for £90, plus I keep my warranty) Can anyone recommend a company for smartphone insurance, as I'd rather pay a small monthly premium than incur massive costs and the lost of my phone for 2 weeks again I've looked at protectmybubble but wondered if anybody had other companies they use? I'm looking for comprehensive cover over cost pm

Hi all, Our APC SmartUPS 1000 failed during a lightning storm yesterday, causing both servers attached to power down. I'm a little confused as the LED's on the front say that the battery is fully charged, only has 2/5ths of full load used and the replace battery LED is not lit? Do I need a new battery for the unit? If so, does anyone know where I can get one cheap or recommend an alternative UPS (My budget is tight, around £100)?