dwhyte85

Hello, My line manager has asked me to give staff responsibilities in-line with the recent payrises received. My issue is that responsibilities I have currently that I can share around are boring, mindnumbing jobs that are really administrative & not really hands on ICT. I have to tread carefully as both members of staff had a pretty bad time with a previous manager, they were left without guidance or help to deal with a monsterous mess, to be fair to the previous manager he also inherited a mess but as the schools requirements have become greater the quality of IT received was gradually getting worse, until i came Both members of staff are happier than they were but, I don't want to be the big bad wolf and give them mindnumbing jobs & make them feel unvalued because of it, to be fair I can quite easily manage all the work I do (bookings for rooms & ICT resources, CMDB management, all ordering/sourcing, ICT Support & management of separate entities such as the VI form laptops where we have to work differently because of protocol). I don't want to lose my staff, they're both hard workers but I don't think it's possible for me to continue with this workload & work on strategy, like my LM has said. What is the best way to approach this with staff who have already had a bad time, have low morale and probably quite happy to walk out...

Hello, Apologies if this sounds a bit obvious. Presumably, you've checked that you don't have 2 anti-virus programs running as this does cause blue screens, we had an issue recently where an old installation of Norton was not correctly removed and was still running in the background whilst Sophos was then installed... consequently the laptop was totally unusable in terms of speed and would then blue screen. If you can get into safe mode it may be worth checking the consistancy of the XP system files (cmd -> sfc /checknow), do a chkdsk & download memtest and give it a whirl to see whether it is an issue of the memory itself. Check all your drivers for sound, video and the like are up to date, if you've recently installed any new drivers or software... even though it may seem totally unrelated remove it/roll back. Good luck

Another BeNaughty... I understand the site would like to make some income, presumably you make money from the green-namers, maybe the site can use less provocative advertising, if a student/teacher/SLT saw that I would be in some trouble, they take Internet misuse very seriously (although I am using this for work purposes!).

With the Derren Brown lottery trick... He's just earned himself our time discussing him & I wonder how many watched the follow up Friday :-P I think Mattx has nailed it with his post and I, like Mattx I hope people don't think systems exist for working out lottery numbers, I've seen many poor students back when I was at uni trying to work off of 'systems' on things like roulette (although, legitimacy of casinos is another matter), mathematically they'd need an awful lot more 'runs' in terms of getting statistics to guesstimate if a number should appear or not and for his method... seriously... lol If it was the case he knew the numbers he'd have shown them before, it's not like anyone could have bought a ticket 2 minutes before the draw, furthermore I doubt Camelot would care if he bought a ticket! He's a very clever chap, at least he's financially secure in the future... the amount of money he will make from his next tour and TV... oh and of course, he can predict the lottery every week, haha.

I've had this a few times, as mentioned above... DNS can be the issue, doing a quick repair normally resolves it.

Mixed bag but has some IT relevance, role based in Woodley, Reading. Thames Valley Educational Recruitment

Churchmead School Fairly average wage, although I remember being told they have alot of the IT managed externally. Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead | Jobs | Show

Very good salary working @ Blessed Hugh Faringdon Catholic School Jobs and Careers - Reading Borough Council Good luck!

Hello, We have put this in (solution 2), we had a limited budget and this seemed to be the best way for us to go. We put in Linksys WAP200E's, changed channels of points within close proximity and standardised all the AP's, we have noticed that people plugging in ad-hoc devices (which isn't allowed!!) it can kill our AP's... especially the Mac plug-in wall thingies. We do have a few issues, mainly with the above and sometimes they do cut out randomly without us really knowing why, overall though for around £2000.00 we pretty much have full coverage of our school and nearly a 5th of the issues we did have... perfect for the 100 netbooks we're about to roll out >_< This is a mini-hijack... with isolation on the APs it seems to resolve the issue with the ad-hoc APs that randomly emerge, it sometimes causes an issue with us having to manually double click the pre-setup connection, we check the details and all is OK (correct encryption, correct password as it's worked prior) - is this normal with isolation of APs?

Hello, I'm sure Solus tells you the users logged in if you are using it. Like already said, give plenty of time when you do have to go do it, I was being nagged for ages and ages because I underestimated how long it'd take... angry office staff ftl.

I spent 25 minutes yesterday trying to explain I needed a PSU, I had to go back and re-do everything i'd already done to satisfy the guy. On the upside the engineer who came out was less than 10 minutes and a nice guy

Because of the HS of it I can't really do it myself and time constraints for 100 leads would be killer. Have found someone who manufactures angled leads (like my amazing drawing), he was from a company called tangible benefits and called Ollie if anyone else has that need - around 4.50 a lead though (desperate!).

Good idea with the travel adapter, thanks for clarifying they're not kettle leads - maybe why I had problem trying to find it online, i've always called them kettle leads because they look the same

Nope :'( Although, some on eBay don't have the rubber protection on the cable!

Do you mean the actual plugging in bit is shaped like an L? I have some of those but it's the physical plug (with 3 prongs) with the cable coming from the bottom is too big to fit in (because of the protection rubber), hopefully a pic may help: http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/9913/plug.jpg Art has never been a strong point.

This is a pretty strange question, can Kettle Leads come with the plugs so the cable comes from the side rather than the underneath or without the thick protection rubber? I'm guessing the latter is pretty obvious that it should come with the thick protection rubber:p We have very tight space within some lockers, unfortunately standard kettle leads do not fit and as pupils may be taking the cables home slicing and re-taping the leads isn't an option. Any advice happily received!

Sold via eBay.

Selling my beloved gaming machine, hard times call for desperate measures :'( The laptop has 9 Months left on warranty, it is just over 2 months old. It is smoke grey coloured, the spec is as follows: 4GB RAM 2.4Ghz Core2Duo Dual SLI 512mb 9800GT (nVidia) Graphics 240gb HDD 17" Widescreen display. Vista Ultimate (with DVD) The machine is cracking, it was bought for £1499.99 and i'm ideally looking for £850.00 for the laptop. It does have 2 slight blemishes (not really noticeable, i'm just painfully pedantic) and on the underneath the 'P' from XPS silver sticky bit has fell off, none of these affect the laptop in anyway. Offers in region of £850.00 or will swap for a good spec netbook & £500.00. Payments in PayPal or MoneyBookers must clear first, delivery @ £20.00 or cash on collection/mutual meet possible. I'm going to miss it

Both off today... will tell them you said hello. IT Support across many schools, Gloucestershire is huge though and hilly isn't it? Beats sitting in the office all day, enjoy!

He asked for opinions on what people think, unfortunately in the real world not everyone is accepting, especially when words like incentive & rewards are mentioned in conjunction with software. We get several phone calls a day from people selling us things offering us rewards if we spend x amount on IT products, we are allowed to be wary. As far as I can see nobody has mocked his idea, it'd make a huge amount of sense to allow us to see the product as it may not be something that is suitable to distribute within a school. An example of blindly handing things out goes back to when I was at my first school... collecting barcodes were all the rage because of the barcode game (Barcode Battler, I think) the school blindly handed out lots of leaflets for a charity campaign to collect barcodes... it turns out it went to an adult who was selling the barcodes. Ok, that sounds pretty pathetic... imagine how the admin office felt after they put these in the registers for the children to take home and how dumb the school looked after they'd fell for it. Obviously the example above is nothing to do with software and a CD, but the damage that could be potentially done. The other issue is if things go wrong, the school would get comeback - especially if people found that the school was being given things for distributing it. Maybe something like a freshers fair exists for parents and schools? That'd be a perfect way to distribute it!

This is slightly besides the point, why would you offer an incentive to a school if you aren't going to make money off of it? I think a school would have to be careful, if they were offering something truly free, eg, OpenOffice on a CD for students & parents it's slightly different to offering something that is 'Free' but you can buy addons/features, it might look a bit like an affiliation which a school would probably like to avoid. I know from my POV, i wouldn't want to offer it as i'd probably get complaints if it didn't work correctly despite me putting 10 disclaimers saying do not contact our ICT dept... if, however it was truly free & bundled with other useful software I might distribute to people who ask for it.

No... not aimed at you whatsoever! If the school gains from it, fair enough... shouldn't be personal gain though. I think procurement in education should be monitored strictly and greater care should be taken auditing schools on what they spend money on... that's a different matter though. From personal experience the companies offering the greatest freebies and offering the best incentives are generally the companies that don't give the best price. I've seen it in big companies where people have taken a slightly more expensive quote so they get a Wii for personal gain, i'm sure the same goes on in schools...

I don't accept freebies or go for incentives. I get the best quality gear I can at the cheapest price I possibly can, i'd hope most schools would be doing that when using tax payer money

We had to put Sophos on the 10.13 range and forward to the easynet range, everything is ok at the moment except we have 170 more laptops to deal with and more students. Just getting everything ready for upcoming term now... fun. What are you doing at the moment?

We just put in the Sophos box, it's working perfectly now... hooray.