crc-ict

Oh yeah, I'd forgotton about the Crystal Maze. I used to love that programme when I was a kid. I can remember even trying to record the theme music by holding a cassette player in front of the TV! :oops: Mind you, I was only about 10 at the time

I'm a fan of Calibri or Gill Sans myself. Calibri for a modern, clean stylish look, or Gill Sans for a more traditional look. Agreed that Times New Roman is way overused, and boring as hell to look at

Thanks, Webman. Much appreciated. :drinkers: Edugeek saves the day again!

Could someone do me an enormous favour and download the full Windows installation package of PDFCreator from SourceForge for me, and then stick it on a safe hosting somewhere. I need it urgently and the school hosting blocks access to SourceForge! I'd be really grateful if someone could. Thanks, Chris

Don't do it! One of my schools uses cheap compatible toners in our Konica Minoltas and in my opinion it is false economy - they're poor quality, they don't last as long as they should and you don't get the option to send them back free for recycling, so we have to get rid of the dead ones somehow. And they're not a whole lot cheaper either. I've also tried DIY refills in various Samsung's at home and they were pretty crappy too.

I'd have to second what every one here is saying about it being crap. It doesn't work properly on a lot of my standalone XP machines and even the teachers agree it is crap. As an aside, it appears to be a dirty hack of Firefox, presumably from fiddling with source. I had a problem on a couple of Acer laptops with missing DLLs, and it threw up error dialogs with 'firefox.exe' in the title. Also, if you go into the options dialog, it refers to 'Minefield', which appears from a quick Google to be a development platform for future versions of Firefox. The GUI is very Firefox-ish too. I wonder if Mozilla are aware and happy, or if it was a similar caper to the infamous copied Iraq WMD dossier??

All the best mate

I don't know, but can't you just slipstream a Server 2003 disk in the same way as an XP disk? Just a thought

I think someone is pulling your chain! We had the same thing - they barricaded our school so much today we couldn't get to the loos without invading the Polling Station :? I even had to dismantle the barricades to get into the Gents, and I wasn't arrested! 8)

AVG here too. Effective, and easy on performance. I hate Norton with a passion - people at my schools keep installing it on their laptops and it seems to block networking access by default! McAfee is almost as bad, although the LEA provided Enterprise edition is OK. And they're so resource hungry - I didn't spend £200 on a Core 2 CPU to waste the power on AV software!

Don't fear the coming of the MacBooks - they're great machines apart from a few annoying niggles. One of my schools got some, and within 3 months, I had bought one for myself! They really cool. Just be aware that they don't stay looking 'Apple-cool' for long once kids get their hands on them, ours are only about 6 months old, but they're scratched and marked to hell. And we've had bad problems with batteries going kaput on us, but Apple released an update just last week which is meant to deal with that issue. Make sure they're 100% updated before they're put into service! A final suggestion is to use the option in Power Settings to make them shut down at some time each night - that stops the problem of them getting left on sleep and completely draining the batteries to the extent that they don't charge anymore!

Some of my schools still have Windows 98 machines in service, so Windows Me is positively modern

Nice! Very nice. If only our LA web hosting had a MySQL server so we could use Joomla...

I'll second Webman! How long does it take to load!! I could've read War and Peace by the time the page finished downloading! Admittedly I'm at home, but it's still a 1Meg broadband connection :s

Thanks for all your help, guys. I've had to give in and contact the LEA/ISP support people and they have something in hand they can do for us. Not as simple as I'd have liked, but there we go! Sadly, it's all got to be done through them without much control from this end, but it's not negotiable. Cheers, Chris.

@Geoff: You have PM @NetworkGeezer: I think SSL is probably over kill really, but it needs some protection. There would be meeting minutes, agendas, contact details etc. on there. So we're not talking National Security, but it needs a bit of protection. @webman: I know what you mean about JavaScript, but it seems we can't do much with the servers Cheers guys, Chris

No luck with .htaccess unfortunately - it looked like exactly what we wanted, but it doesn't work. I guess the server doesn't support it. It is a server provided by the LEA so I don't know what type of server it is, nor do I have any sort of access to it other than a standard FTP connection to our area of it. Looks like it's going to have to be one of those unpleasant JavaScript type jobs on the page itself

I have had a request from our Chair of Governors to set up a secure area on the school website where information for the Governing Body can be posted. I am currently researching this project and am seeking suggestions of what we can achieve within the realms of our basic LEA hosting, bearing in mind that we have simple access for PHP and ASP scripting (on request) but no access to a database server. Ideally, we would like to have an authenticated username and password for each governor, but in the absence of being able to do this, a single password to access the area would suffice. If anyone has any suggestions for this, I'd be really grateful to hear them! Thanks, Chris

We've just got one of the new RM all in ones and I wouldn't describe it as small form factor - it's massive!

I always thought they were singing "Ooh, Ooh, my ass is alight" on that one!

Ohhh its alright for some! You took the words right out of my mouth! And on an educational techie salary too!!

That's my area too, and what you're seeing is right, it's a bare market at the moment. I guess I'm reaching a similar situation to you at the moment, so I'm keeping a look out, but not finding much. If I see anything (that I don't fancy myself :-P ) I'll let you know Chris

Been there, done that! Can I get anybody to use it? Can I heck-as-like! They all still use the book! (which I'm not allowed to get rid of)

Left the mobile on my heap in my office/cupboardby mistake! It's nice when someone appreciates what you do for a change... even if their average age was 3! That's why I'm so keen on the wonderful world of Primary. In the main, the kids are delightful rather than destructive, and in my experience the teachers really appreciate your help. I'd stay forever if I could, but I fear the lack of prospect to increase money might end up preventing that...

Batteries have been known to go flat, though