crc-ict

Sorry to bump this again, but I am a real tangle with this and am desperate to try and find solutions! Anyone know of any good Mac specific forums where I might find some Mac gurus who will be friendly to a newbie? Cheers, Chris

Absolutely agree with all the sentiments here. Thanks to everyone concerned, this site is a fantastic resource, and a great source of entertainment at times too! And long live Edugeek!

I wonder if any of the Mac experts here can help me... One of our teachers would like to use an ancient Data Harvest control box with Flowol 2 on our Macs - Flowol has the right drivers, but the Mac doesn't have a suitable RS-232 connection. To solve this, we have purchased a USB-Serial converter - a Prolific model. This has drivers for OS X and seems to work from there, but Flowol (which runs in Classic mode) can't see the port. Does anyone know how I can get the USB connected serial port to show up in Classic? Can I install the OS 9 driver into the Classic system folder? Or is there some other way? I have the OS X driver installed at present. I would be extremely grateful for any help. Thanks, Chris.

Looks OK, but my first thought is can you trust the company behind it to decide whether the adverts carried are suitable and/or appropriate for the kids?

Very funny But I'm intrigued to know - does anyone else hear them chant 'badger-badger-badger-badger...' the first time, but once you've seen the mushroom, you hear 'magic-magic-magic-magic...' instead? Perhaps I'm just mad! Could be

Thanks, Russ, but got an e-mail back from their technical people, and it's not possible Had to order a USB-Serial adaptor for the Mac in the end so can do the demos on there! (I forgot to mention that the whole point of putting it on the PC was to use an ancient Serial connected control box with the programs!)

I have been tasked with finding a way to transfer files between the Mac and Windows versions of the control program Flowol 2. We are currently using it on a mobile classroom of Macs but the teachers sometimes wish to transfer files to a Windows machine to demo the work on the IWB. I have no problem with connecting to a the Windows shared folder and transferring the file from the Mac, adding the relevant .FLO extension. However, once the file has arrived in Windows land, Windows Flowol can't read it - trying to open the file causes a General Protection Fault and closes the application. I have looked at the files in Notepad, and they appear to be of a different format. Was hoping someone here might have some knowledge of Flowol and have found a solution to this problem? Any suggestions would be very gratefully received! Cheers, Chris

I have been asked to look a friend's laptop which has been behaving strangely lately. It is a Toshiba Satellite 1900, P4 2.4GHz, about 3 years old. When she uses the machine, after about 10 minutes or so, it switches itself off. No shutdown sequence, no error messages, no beeps or anything, just powers straight off. It seems to happen more quickly when the processor is working hard. The fan can be heard to be running fast, and speeding up as workload increases. I have removed a door from the bottom of the machine which exposes a metal cover adjacent to a ventilation grille on one side and the outlet of the fan unit on the other, and this is extremely hot to the touch. I am guessing that perhaps the fan is running but not blowing properly for some reason? I was wondering if anyone here had any other ideas, and also whether anyone knows of a good source of Toshiba laptop spares, preferably who are willing to deal direct with the public. I'd be grateful to hear any suggestions - I'm running out of ideas! Cheers, Chris

Welcome to my world!

I think you could safely replace 'might' with 'will' - they tend to persue anyone they catch infringing the copyright of the roundel mercilessly!! You have been warned!

I followed that kind of theme at home. My lone server* is called Iridium - I just liked the name! I'm more boring with my PCs - I just derive a single word name from the make and/or model so I can recognise more easily which is which! Hence I'm typing this on Scaleo, although I could have used e170, MV1214 or iPaq!! *Well, calling it a server is a bit grand really - it runs Debian on an old PIII Celeron 600 laptop, running Samba, Apache, PHP and MySQL for file server, intranet server and playing with Moodle!

Yup, I'd like to know that too! I spent the whole evening trying to e-mail a load of photos using other accounts because my main e-mail - hosted with Fasthosts - was down Outlook works really badly when half of the e-mail accounts on it aren't working!

I'm really hoping you are talking about the Air Con unit here?

Wow! The size! The power! How old is this tool? It's been a while since an 8Gb hard disk was considered 'huge'. 80Gb seems puny these days. Sorry, just made me laugh!

I can personally recommend PC Inspector Smart Recover from Convar. This recovered a load of photos for me when the CF card from my D-SLR died. It's a free download from: http://www.pcinspector.de/download.asp?language=1#smart_recovery Just be aware that it will recover any previously deleted, un-overwritten files from earlier use of the card as well as the corrupted files. Hope it works for you Chris

Don't get the Mac version if you're running OS X - we had terrible problems getting it to work properly and never fixed issues with Spreadsheet. Finally, tech support said there was no way to solve them. Windows version is fine, though, no real problems with that.

Same here, I'm on Wanadoo 1Mbps (I live in the sticks - was 512k until about 2 months ago!) and that's capped a 2Gb a month, so as well as taking about 13-14hrs, it would have used 2 months download allowance too! Hope it doesn't take too long to come - been wanting to try Vista right from the first beta!

Not neccessarily - I've got a Sharp Actius notebook and that has a traditional CR2016 backup battery for the CMOS under a little screwed-down door on the bottom. I had an Acer beforehand and didn't ever find a similar battery compartment, but that machine is now 6 years old, living a charmed life as a samba server and has never needed attention to a CMOS battery. If absolutely nothing happens, my guess would be CPU or motherboard failure - you'd get some sort of error with basically everything else except a graphics card or LCD failure (where there would be no way of seeing an error), but it wouldn't power itself off in that instance. Hope you find it! Chris

That's funny, I (as a bloke) was interviewed for Senior Technician at a girls High School a couple of weeks back and was asked how I would cope in a predominantly female environment!! My answer obviously wasn't completely convincing, as I didn't get the job Seriously, though, it must be hard for females to get on in IT, and it is a real shame. Although the industry is male-orientated, there is no reason for it to be so, and I think we should all work hard to try and overcome that idea - especially in education where it is important to encourage all students to have the opinion that they can choose any profession they wish and not feel limited to roles traditionally associated with their gender. Chris

Wouldn't using fibre be somewhat overkill for giving a single machine internet access? I would have thought the external grade Cat 5 was the easiest way of doing it - perhaps using a catenary if needed. Although, if there is a future need for more networked machines in the remote building the fibre makes more sense then.

If it helps with the dilemma, I will share my recent experiences in trying to get into the educational ICT field full-time. For the last three years, I have been doing a BA(Hons) in Primary Education and ICT. My course finishes tomorrow and I'm now at the stage of looking for jobs - my aim is to work in ICT support in education. Last week, I was interviewed for two positions. 1. A relatively low paid (c.11k) term-time vanilla ICT technician in a large comprehensive school with sixth form, bottom of the ladder among 3 other technicians. 2. A better paid (c.17k) Senior/Graduate ICT Technician at a smaller girl's high school, second in command to the Network Manager and above one ICT Technician. I have no formal IT qualifications, but a lot of knowledge. I have three Science A-levels, two years studied on a (very) serious Science-related degree and will have my BA(Hons) soon. I have little experience except for about a year of working part-time as a Tech in a local Primary school. Here's my point: I didn't get either job. And these were the reasons I was given: Job 1. They felt with my profile, I would be better suited to a supervisory position, and that I was overqualified for the post. Job 2. They felt I didn't have the experience. I lost out to a candidate with previous Secondary ICT experience. So, I have come to the conclusion that with my background, having a degree is going to be more of a hinderance than a help. I can't get a 'bottom rung' job as a starting point to gain experience because I appear overqualified, but I can't get a job further up the ladder more suited to my profile because I don't have the base level experience. I would say for someone who is adamant that they want to follow the ICT Technical Support-type role, doing a degree is probably not the best way to go, unless there is opportunity to gain significant experience alongside it. This is just my opinion from where I'm at now, and although YMMV, I feel that doing the degree has (employment-wise) been a waste of three years and almost £20k. Hope this helps. Chris P.S. If anyone knows of any good school ICT support jobs going in the Chichester/Portsmouth area, please let me know!

ROFL I love it! What a fine idea!

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. I think I'll just slip a diagram into my jacket pocket just in case that does come up! Cheers, Chris.

Thanks, guys. The job description actually states Network Cabling and Installations, so I guess having to do it is a good possibility! Any more ideas - was hoping for something like the "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" thing for the colours of the rainbow... Not sure that this particular sequence really lends itself, though! Chris

Dear All, I have interviews tomorrow and Thursday for ICT Technician posts and both of these have practical test components to them. One question/task that I am dreading coming up is the making of a network cable - I can never remember the wiring sequence without having to look at a diagram! I was just wondering if anyone out there knows a clever mnemonic or some other way of remembering the colour sequence easily? Cheers, Chris.