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Exactly the same situation by the sounds of it, although I'm on about 20 miles each way commute. My need is for caravan towing too! How is the Outlander? I might be looking for a new towcar later this year / early next (HQ wants a heavier caravan!).

I've never needed to either. But it's nice to know the capability is there. And for me, it's not worth the additional expense and hassle to 'upgrade' to a less capable vehicle. Having said all that, some quick 'back of a fag packet' maths has just shown me that something like a Nissan Leaf would make an awful lot of sense for my wife, who has a rather different use case for a car than I do. I also throw a spanner in the works for needing towing capability with long range too!

Might be worth having the chargers in the Sync stations checked out - might be supplying too much voltage and frying the batteries? LiPo batteries like these normally go wrong because of physical damage (unlikely inside an undamaged iPad), too high discharge current or overcharging. I'd bet on overcharging.

And that, to me, is why electric cars are not ready to replace ICE yet. I've got my diesel Mondeo sitting outside, with about 150 miles worth of fuel left in it. If I suddenly have a need to drive to, eg Edinburgh right now, I can spend 5 minutes at the fuel station at the bottom of the road and I'm good for the journey. I don't even need to do that because I could also set off immediately, then when I'm ready for a break stop and spend 5 minutes in the services north of London filling up, and be good for fuel to complete my journey. With an electric car, there simply isn't that functionality. Even if I had charged it fully the night before, in the best case scenario I'd be looking at needing at least one 45-60 minute charging stop and in many cases, more or longer stops depending on the car, available chargers etc. I know all about needing rest stops etc, but the whole point of a car is for that to be down to me, to have the flexibility to stop when and for how long I need to, not the car. Although I am a bit of a petrolhead, the techie in me wishes that the electric car was a better competitor. But unfortunately, until its potential capabilities can match what me dinosaur-powered car can do, I'm out.

Problem we consistently have with compact cameras is complaints from staff about the quality and usability of them compared to their phone cameras. Not really surprising that we spend about £80 on a compact camera that then isn't as good as the camera in a nearly-£1k iPhone though!

But will price parity come? Yes, economy of scale will come into play and also the offsetting of R&D costs, but presumably the minerals that are needed for eg the batteries are expensive because they are either scarce or difficult to extract. Because we suddenly need more of them doesn't mean that they become any more plentiful or any easier to extract. And won't there be as much disruptive backlash at additional works to extract these minerals as there is about for example fracking to extract oil? And no-one seems to be thinking about what we will do with all of the batteries that will need responsible disposal at the end of their lives, and also the cars themselves that I fear will become uneconomical to repair at much younger ages than ICE vehicles once the hugely expensive batteries start dying. Are they going to be like old laptops, still functional but tossed onto the scrap heap because they only have ten minutes battery left and no-one wants to pay HP or Dell £75 for a new battery for a 5 year old laptop? If these Tesla's are around £40k new, that means with depreciation they will be worth only around £8,000 at 10 years old - so who is going to pay £15-20k for a new battery for it?

Are these classroom PCs that are being used to drive an IWB and a monitor via the on-board video in duplicate mode? If so, we have the same problem from time to time - system slows to a crawl and becomes almost unresponsive. Have it on both Win10 LTSB 2016 (1607) and Win10 LTSC 2019 (1809). Can't find the cause, although I've seen reference to it online. Can be 'fixed by doing a quick Windows+P, select PC screen only (everything will unfreeze), then back to Duplicate again and all will be well for a while. May not be the issue, but sounds kind of similar.

I've got one. Mine opens too. Permanently closed off with blinds of course.

As others have suggested, be careful. Our fax line is actually shared with the alarm system, and it would be very hard to tell that from the socket end, or anywhere near it. Cut with caution!

I don't know the specifics of the Now TV device, but a problem I have had with certain devices is that our filtering uses SSL interception, and so a security certificate needs to be installed on devices to allow secure connections without errors being generated. Even if the stick has Proxy options, I would be willing to bet that it doesn't have the functions to install a certificate. May not be an issue for you depending on your filtering etc, but might be worth considering...

Had a chuckle when this came through this morning: I knew VeryPC service was good, but to have the big man himself delivering their goods... @VeryPC

Thanks @Arthur and @LeMarchand Hopefully this gets programmed according to local laws before it goes global!

Genuine question: is 'undertaking' allowed in the US? Because in that clip, the Tesla certainly overtook a few cars from what appeared to me to be Lane 1. Which is not impressive, unless it is considered OK in Stateside?

I'm shocked that with the current school budget situation that schools are actually considering spending money on a dedicated system for this. Yes, it is high-profile and emotive issue, but the surely likelihood of such a system being put to use in a real situation is, thankfully, small? We have got around it by devising a procedure which makes use of the instant messaging software we already have and use across the site, and the internal telephones. (And we are a school that has had a previous lockdown incident and it was handled perfectly at the time with no system or procedure - ours happened long before the concept of 'lockdown' became trendy!)

Multimeter is OK for a quick working/dead check on a battery, but limited use to assess remaining capacity of a battery. A multimeter set to volts will measure the open circuit voltage of a battery, which doesn't give a true indication of the battery charge status - an almost dead battery might still meet the rated voltage open circuit. You need to measure the voltage under load to determine state of charge. Even a simple tester like this (about £2 on CPC) will apply a load to the battery whilst reading and give a charge indication on the meter.

Yeah, apparently a couple of guys came all the way over from Russia for two days just to see it

Another +1 for this. I've got one here and it does a great job on projector filters etc. Also +1 for the comments on dust masks. I always end up with a cold after cleaning lots of projector filters if I don't use a mask, so can only imagine what it'd be like after 300 PCs We've got an outdoor power point on the playground that I always use for this if I can. It's more pleasant doing the job in the open air too!

Good to see another fan of Clive here!

Who thinks this will last more than 10 minutes before someone on SLT calls and says they have an urgent e-mail that must bypass the 10 minute delay? As others have said, madness. Another example of leadership demanding a technical solution to a non-technical problem!

We are having an issue with SIMS FMS here: when the finance team try to go use the Salary Calculator section, and create or edit a new calculation set, the data entry window that opens does not have a large enough working area to allow all of the buttons and controls to be shown. Resizing the window manually doesn't help either, it just shrinks and grows the central 'table' control but still leaves the buttons hanging off the bottom and side of the window. We've tried different screen resolutions, they don't have any odd settings for zoom, text size or DPI. Has anyone come across this before? Thanks Chris.

Yes, it's scary isn't it?! When I was researching this, I read that the default settings allow use of the maximum available bandwidth!! I don't know what triggers it, as ours was obviously not the same round of updates as yours, but I do know that it happened on a Wednesday, the day after a Patch Tuesday...

I agree with this completely - I have no problem with 'mucking in' to other areas of work, but the expectations and requirements with audio and lighting for productions is just outside my skill set. Using my IT skills, I can work the equipment, but what I lack is the creative side - I don't have any theatrical inclinations and I don't know what will look good in terms of lighting or how to tune the audio to that perfect mix between the background music and the variety of volumes of children's voices! Sometimes I think our year groups forget that we are a primary school and not the National Theatre! I don't know what the answer is though - I guess for those who have the grand ideas and make the requests to invest the time into learning how it all works to create their vision rather than just leaving it to IT because it uses electronic equipment.

They always get the PAT testers in during the day in term time here, so strictly visual only for servers, switches and any 'infrastructure'. Yes, the LA require 12 monthly PAT for everything, but these items get recorded on the list, and get a pass sticker, just recorded as Visual Only. Anyone who wanted to do otherwise here would be told to 'go fish'.

We had the same thing here a few months ago. Completely took out our 100Mb leased line. It's related to the 'peer-to-peer' updates functionality in Windows 10. You can fix it by disabling BITS Peercaching via GPO. These are the settings I used to cure it: