crc-ict

The Daily Mail does this most days, admittedly a few days behind Reddit!

Yes, that should work. Although performance will be throttled as the maximum speed of the uplink to the main switch is shared between the PCs on your small switch.

Nice to know we are in such a strong financial position as a country that we can afford a pointlessly ostentatious gesture like this... Wait a minute, I forgot for a minute, we're broke. Who thinks up these ideas?

I might be wrong (haven't looked into this in detail as yet) but wouldn't SkyDrive be the de facto solution here rather than Dropbox? Maybe as part of an Office 360 rollout?

Don't do it - we lived in a flat which had electric storage heaters and it was a nightmare. We were always cold in the evenings because the heaters had given out all their heat in the daytime when no-one was home, and we were spending an absolute fortune on electricity - because they are expensive to run and we ended up having to supplement with standalone electric heaters at night. Gas central heating all the way - might be expensive initially, but it's the way to go.

Is that an iMac missing it's front glass lurking the back right of the image?

Thanks @FN-GM, I'll give that a try and see if it helps. @squeeky, I was thinking of doing that, but initial log-on is very slow on this network (about 2 minutes on 'Preparing Windows...') so I was hoping to avoid that necessity. Thanks all!

Hello, We are running Windows 8 on a collection of netbooks, all joined to the domain and connecting via Wireless. We are having an issue where pupils are logging on and finding that they have no shortcuts from the start menu redirection - I think it happens if they lose the network connection between authentication and the 'Preparing Windows' stage at log on. The annoying thing is that then the profile stored for that user is broken on that machine and they will never get shortcuts unless their profile is deleted. Pupils are also not getting printers from time to time (allocated through GPP/Printer Connections) which I think has a similar cause. I am on the verge of disabling logon with cached credentials, but I am thinking that might get annoying and was hoping for a better solution. Any ideas? Thanks Chris.

You can source Lenovo parts through the IBM parts website: https://www-304.ibm.com/shop/europe/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/default/CategoryDisplay?langId=826&catalogId=-826&storeId=826&categoryId=3063814 We did this on several occasions for A70z parts at my old place. The finance office found getting an account set up to be a bit of a toil though - persistence was required!

I've done a bit of the model railway thing. Still got my layout, although now at my Dad's house and not set up since having children and not having the space for it. This is Blackvale - a fictional modern(ish) era West Country branch terminus. Don't have the time or the space for much modelling at the moment, except I am very slowly building a model light aircraft from a balsa kit.

My wife's PC started doing a similar thing when I installed a Sandisk Extreme SSD. It's a fairly old Acer Aspire PC with nForce motherboard. Initially we upgraded it with a Sandisk Ultra SSD and all was brilliant - it became nippy and responsive and she was very happy with it. Then 7 months in, the SSD died. Sandisk support were great, agreed to swap it out and said they would replace it with the Extreme SSD to avoid future problems. So when it arrived, I popped it in, imaged it from the original HDD I had kept after the first upgrade and all seemed OK for a week or so. Then the problems started - initially all that happened was the PC had a tendency to cut off when it tried to sleep. Fixed that by disabling Hybrid Sleep, but very soon it started to just cut off randomly and then we had problems with it booting - 'no system disk' errors and that ilk, but which were fixed by powering off and on again. Eventually, we couldn't get it working at all. I assumed another dead SSD, but it worked fine in my PC. So assumed a dead SATA controller/motherboard. But the original WD Blue HDD works fine. I have now concluded it's just a fatal incompatibility between the newer SATA 3 SSD and the old SATA 2 controller on the motherboard.

My old place used to have the odd few injectors housed in cabinets to run Wireless APs. It was tidier and easier to have them in the cab where there was already power, and not to have to install power at the location of each WAP.

We have 7 trolleys of netbooks here currently, and quite a large batch of them are becoming due for replacement this year. With the general demise of netbooks and the resulting non-availability, I was wondering what other schools are doing about replacing them? As I'd like to be trying to keep the same trolleys, and that the small size suits our KS1 and 2 children, I would be looking for similar-sized machines and similar price-point to a netbook. What has everyone been doing about this? I was thinking about the tablet route (especially as we are a Win 8 school) but prices for a decent x86 Win8 tablet are still quite high and I'm not sure we are ready for the form factor just yet. Cheers!

Our plan is similar to @strawberry's approach - use a large-screen display (not interactive) which is a good bit cheaper than an IWB or an interactive display, even for a professional TV, and team this with a touch-screen PC display of maybe 22". We need to buy the computers anyway, we are all Windows 8 so touch makes sense for this and we should in theory be able to save some money too! Thanks people.

We are currently working on a new build and replacement project in our school (3-form entry first and middle) and are considering replacing traditional interactive whiteboard/projector combos with large format TV displays and touch screen PCs. I was wondering if there was anyone out there who has done a similar thing, who has any tales to tell or found any lessons to be learnt from doing this? Also, I'm interested in any EduGeek's thoughts about this as an idea. In the way of caveats all I'm really concerned about is the life of the displays - I hope I have addressed this by speccing professional signage-type displays intended for continuous use I'd be really interested to hear any tips of opinions on this plan! Thanks.

I have the task of trying to deploy a Windows 8 image to about 60 netbooks via WDS. The netbooks are Samsung NB-30s and they are unbelievably slow at installing the image- it takes over 3 hours to complete! Does anyone have ideas how I might be able to speed this up? Other deployments to different machines on the same network complete much more quickly so it seems to be a problem specific to these netbooks? Any ideas people? Thanks :-)

I think those vinyl skins look awesome, especially the titanium effect one. Just depends how much you can trust the website's claim that they don't leave any sticky residue on the surface... Not too bad at £7.50 ish delivered from Canada though!

I've got a nexus 4 which I use with no case and don't have any problems with slippery-ness. Just got a cheap 'screen protector' on the rear glass (from a German outfit on eBay, 5x for less than £2) and use a nice leather PDAir Belt Holster from MobileFun to carry it around in. I find the protector on the back gets around the slippery there, and the front seems to become less slick once it gets a bit grubby from use. I tried a screen protector on the front, but I found it hard to get one to stick properly and missed the smooth feel of the glass for using the phone. Fingers crossed no scratching issues so far either, so it looks like Gorilla Glass 2 does its job.

I think I understand, although it's difficult to explain. If you are driving at say 55-60 and being tailgated, it is more dangerous for you than doing 70 with following vehicles a good distance behind - there is a higher risk of a following driver misjudging and colliding with your rear-end. However, that danger is through no fault of your own, and you are not causing that danger by driving more slowly. I guess it depends on how you feel about being tailgated. Personally, I have experienced a rear-end collision, and as a consequence am uncomfortable with vehicles very close behind me, even though I know any resulting collision would be the other driver's fault. And I know that increasing your own speed is not the proper way to deal with it, but sometimes increasing the gap by speeding up just feels like the safest thing to do. Back on topic, I'm not at all keen on the idea of my driving performance being judged by a 'blind' device analysing parameters without situational awareness. There are inevitably times when harsh braking, sharp cornering or (less so) fast acceleration have to occur because of the circumstances or the design of particular roads and a device that simply gives you a black mark because you exceeded an arbitrary parameter with no explanation for why seems unfair.

We've had a few things from LaptopBits: Laptop Keyboard, Laptop Screens, Laptop Batteries, Laptop Power Supplies, UK Based, Two Year Warranty! before with no problems.

Depending on your policy, this sort of thing might be covered. But as I understand it, they would require evidence of severe weather from a source like the Met Office. Probably not easy or cheap to get. Best best is probably to call them up and ask - it will all depend on their policy.

Mainboards aren't too bad in an RM One. It's things like PSU or optical drives that are the killer - anything that involves accessing the front compartment really!

I'd agree with that, the stock JB mail is so so basic! Only alternative I could find that was free and didn't look naff was K-9 Mail. Although, I have used that before and wasn't a big fan - it is based on the stock Android client so still has the basic look and feel. I'd also love to hear any good suggestions - I would love to get something like the HTC Mail on my Nexus 4, I miss things like peak and off peak checking schedules, sensible copying between folders etc.

I had a similar shock when I got my Nexus 4 for Christmas. Very few pre-installed apps, and things like the stock Android Calendar and E-Mail client are very spartan compared to the HTC offerings I had on my Sensation.

Although, if it is anything like registering for their iPad manager tool, you will be plagued by marketing contact for the rest of your life...