crc-ict

Sorry for the delay guys, on holiday this week so only just found out! Looks like box number 2 please! Thanks!!

We have almost a school-full of X3s - at last count original lamps were over £400. For us, replacement of the projectors is a no-brainer. We're replacing with Epson EB-93e's, at £408 with a 3yr lamp warranty. They seem to be mount and position compatible with the X3s too, so an easy swap. Well, easy as long as the power socket is nearby as the 93's use a 3-pin IEC connector vs. the 2 pin figure-8 connector of the x3's. The difference is brightness and image quality is outstanding. We tried compatibles but had a bad experience - very short life and abysmal brightness on the ones we tried, although YMMV.

Thinkpad E530s have horrible touchpads - we have a lot of E520s and recently when we bought some more could only get E530s and we really dislike the touchpads. Other than that seem like solid machines. Not sure they have 3 year warranties as standard though, although I was recently impressed to discover the warranty on our E520s was onsite.

This is the biggest issue with this way of working. The school cannot reasonably expect that anyone who works only 4 hours a week will be available whenever they need extra time - they may have outside of work commitments, or especially if working in multiple schools to make up hours, may be working at other sites. I've been there - trying to manipulate schedules to cover 'emergencies' at one school but so that others don't miss out is a headache and a half!

I would say the issue here is the hours on offer. The hourly rate is much the same as my own, and I do all of the things mentioned and consider myself to be competent. This is on the South Coast so a similar economic area. The issue for getting good staff will be finding someone of a high standard who only wants 4 hours a week work. I used to work similarly with a number of schools, but needed to amass a number of schools in the same area to make this viable. In the end, I had to leave and join a local comprehensive full-time to survive financially. Just my opinion, but I feel this would be best served by an external provider, who can do the contracted 4 hours a week, but also has staff available to provide the extra backup if and when needed.

What about Google Nexus 7s? They are decently priced and meant to be very good.

But the do all have e's we can use like this: FAC£BOOK, APPL£ and GOOGL£ :-) lol Only works in caps though...

Thanks for that - had been considering something like this, but couldn't find a solid recommendation anywhere for which of the myriad of ROMs were good! I'll check it out.

Don't get an HTC Desire - my wife has got one and the internal storage is too small. You only get less than 150MB for apps, and believe me, it's nowhere near enough. Updates for built-in apps alone on her phone mean less than 50MB available for downloaded apps. Android is good, but you want a more modern phone than that with much more internal memory.

Probably WiFI antennae I would guess

If the drivers are digitally signed, you can put them in a folder on the PC and then add that folder to the DevicePath value in the Registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion. You can probably even make an MSI to copy the files and set the registry key. Just take great care not to remove any of the other folder entries in the DevicePath key. At the very least there should already be %systemroot%\INF value which must never be removed. However, if the drivers aren't signed, they will still only auto install for administrators unless you set up the policies to allow non-admins to install unsigned drivers.

Look at the specs though, not exactly cutting edge. How small are those IOPS values??!!

New & Used Cars, UK Car Dealers | Parkers is a useful source of information about buying cars too. Price/value guides, professional reviews, owner reviews, spec guides etc. You may want to look at this page: Nissan Micra K12 2003 - Car Review | Honest John suggests they are not great, especially with 'intelligent key'

If you read the write-up, it says Full HD and the specs give the resolution as 1920x1080 Theirs is certainly full HD.

My in-laws have got one of these: Buy Technika 32-248 32 inch Widescreen HD Ready LED Backlit TV with Freeview from our LED TVs range - Tesco.com Decent price and seems like a nice set. It's better than the Toshiba we bought for about £30 more a couple of weeks before they bought that. LED backlit, full HD and very thin. You might even be able to buy it locally if you have a large Tesco nearby.

One thing to remember with custom builds swapping HDD for SSD - make sure you confirm that the motherboard being supplied supports SATA 6Gbps. We had to make a late change to a build spec because the original board only had SATA 3Gbps ports. It was sorted no problems but is a gotcha to look out for.

Solutions Inc (Apple Premium Reseller Store in the UK - Apple Products and more at Solutions inc.) do a 'Mates Rates' personal discount scheme on Apple kit for teachers/school staff if the school registers for it. I think it's something like 6 or 8% discount. Not sure if you can use it for multiple purchases, however.

The online store looks like a way to go for us. We wouldn't be allowed to place orders online (local procedures mean everything needs 2 signatures and has to go through the finance office) but being able to look up pricing would be ideal. As has already been said, however good someone is on the phone, or however quickly they respond to e-mails, sometimes just looking up quickly on a website is the fastest way to get things done - there are only 1.5 of us now, and seconds count.

For us, we use Misco for a lot of our day to day stuff. A big plus point with them for us is the website. When we just want something simple and mundane, it's a great timesaver to be able to browse online, see stock, get a price and fill out an order (internal, not online) without having to e-mail someone and wait for a reply or make a phonecall. It's just easier, you can set out to 'do an order for xxxx' and get the whole task done in one go.

Indeed, I have the Windows 8 Release Preview running beautifully on an Asus Eee 1225B, which runs an AMD C60 chip (albeit with 4GB RAM). It's one of the few with the requisite 1366x768 resolution however. It's much more responsive than under Windows 7 HP.

I've managed to get mine up and running with sabnzbd (for newsgroup downloads) under Raspbian. It sits next to my HomeHub, powered from the USB port. I've got two folders mounted on my home NAS, so I can dump NZB files in one folder, then the Pi does it's stuff and puts the downloads in another folder. Magic! I think it's amazing that something so small as the Pi can handle something like that, especially with the web interface too! Only snag is unrar doesn't work too well so sometimes I just end up with a load of RARs to extract myself, but it's pretty cool.

I was under the impression that none of these conversions were road legal? Leaving you open to prosecution and invalidation of your insurance. You would also have to declare the modification to your insurer. It's something to do with an absence of E marking - to achieve an E mark a replacement part must be of the same type as the original. And as DMcCoy points out, self-levelling systems are essential to prevent dazzle from Xenon lighting and I doubt that can be easily retro-fitted. If you feel you must have something whiter, probably best to try one of the ultra bright, ultra white replacement standard bulbs from a reputable lamp maker.

Sounds like a great opportunity, assuming of course it's a good enough friend that you know 100% you can trust. Only because otherwise putting the money in to do the house up would be a huge gamble if there was even the smallest risk of the deal falling through, you being told to move out and left with nothing. It's the sort of thing I'd jump at with the right 'landlord' though, good luck to you.

That actually sounds like a good situation to me, being a tenant just a few miles over the border from you in West Sussex. Our rent, on a 3 bed house, comes to almost 60% of my income! And that doesn't count everything else. And being married with two under-5s, 'everything else' is a lot. No doubt CPLTD will be along a minute to call me financially irresponsible too, I only wish I had any other choice.

Some sort of telegraph device?