gavins38

I missed out on this last year because I didn't even know it existed, but halloween makeup turned my beard white so I shaved it off and joined the Movember site as well. Of course I've tried growing a beard before but my beard is so light barely anyone even noticed then so not sure if I'll have anything to show come the end of the month!

We did a test to see if buying SSD's would pay off for the school. Our test machine was a Pentium D with 256MB RAM. It was ridiculously quick and booted Windows XP in a few seconds. Applications opening instantly and we had 100 explorer windows, 80 internet explorer windows and 50 word windows open, and still it showed no lag at all. Okay, it was overkill but we wanted to see how far we could push it. We probably could have gone further!

I love you man! You just solved me a whole day's headache! Thanks!

The Fades is the best thing I've seen on TV since Heroes first aired. It's got me and my wife on the edge of our seats every week with the tension! Brilliant stuff!

All of the schools in our county are coming to the end of their contract with Uniservity and are being offered the opportunity to trial and sign up for the new Life site. We're currently looking at alternatives and one that looks promising to us is Microsoft Sharepoint. There's a free version (with some limited features) or the full version that still looks to cost less than the ongoing costs of Uniservity.

Blast! I've just installed this on one of office PCs here at the secretary was already having issues with Outlook in the first place. Thanks for the heads up, you've already saved me a ton of time looking for a solution.

Thanks very much, will give this a try!

I'm at a primary school that wants to be able to access the custom media player on Children's Poetry Archive (halfway down the left hand side of the page). For some strange reason though the media player will not work. I've checked the web filtering for the school, and the site is allowed, I've checked that JavaScript is enabled and I've tested in both IE and Firefox. Yet still the buttons on the player do nothing. Even more confusing is that I tested at home and it works perfectly. I cannot see any reason why it's not working in the school. Has anyone else encountered this site and a similar problem, or can anyone shed any light on the problem, because I'm out of ideas?

This is our suppliers website with the tech specs: Samsung SP-F10 projector Perhaps it's a typo on their part?

We've got a loan unit from our projector suppliers and it looks pretty good. We got the 2000 lumens one and even on eco mode it's perfectly clear. Haven't really put it side by side with the Casio models for comparison but on price it's a winner. There's no way to test the claims of 50000 hours of life in eco mode, but the same applies to the Casio models. It'll basically be down to getting one and giving it a go, see how long it lasts. They only have a 3 year warranty compared to the 5 years that Casio offer on their EDU line, so whether that is a commentary on Samsung's belief in the technology or not I don't know. However I'm a big fan of all Samsung equipment and I've never found fault with anything of theirs that I've used. I've had netbooks, mobile phones, vacuum cleaners, tvs. Never had a problem, so I'm willing to bet that their LED projectors will also stand the test of time.

The school isn't currently using any classroom management software so I could look down that route, and to get value for money emphasize the other features of the software. I had a quick look at italc but couldn't see any similar feature on there. @Steve21 The teachers won't have access to run any remote scripts, at most they have local admin rights. URL shortening is an interesting idea and that's finally shed some light on what bit.ly is all about! I think putting all the links on a Word document sounds like the easiest way to go and I don't think the teacher should have trouble with that! Thanks very much for all your suggestions!

I'm not sure if anyone can point me in the direction of suitable software for this teacher query. Basically I've been approached by a teacher who has asked me if there is any way their actions on one computer can be mimicked on the others in our IT suite. When probed further her explanation was that in one particular lesson the pupils had to access a particular website, but some where so slow typing the address or made mistakes, that it too a large part of the lesson just trying to get them to the right site. She wanted to be able to type the URL into a master computer and have the same website open up on every computer in the suite. Not sure if I've explained it too well but if anyone has ideas of software or scripts that can do what she's asking I'd really appreciate it because so far my searches have come up with nothing.

The EES scheme from Microsoft is pretty decent as described above by Maark. We took out our agreement through Misco and whole proceedure has been pretty smooth sailing. It's saved the school thousands in licensing costs.

Wow... Isn't it great that they've finally found the root cause of all the problems in society! As an avid gamer it's only going to be a matter of time before I get fat/go braindead/go on a killing spree/die.

One of the schools I support is using version 4.74 of Testbase but when they try to open KS1_ENG or KS1_MATHS they get an error message "Out of memory". Testbase opens but will not view the files. If you click on any of the sections on the left menu you just get the same error pop up. Has anyone ever encountered this before and have any ideas what's causing it and how to fix it? Thanks!

My Xbox live gamertag is vin alpha but I've only recently got my xbox so games are a little short in numbers at the moment!

It's a bit of a long shot I know, but my wife has a metal dance mat and one of the sensors is playing up. Anyone know if there are any companies that do repairs to dance mats or if there are any good guides on the internet for DIY solutions? She really gets a lot of use of her dance mat and the cheapo plastic ones tend to break too easily, and I can't afford to buy her a new metal mat as they seem to start about £150!

I've installed iTALC 1.0.11 in our schools' IT suite and I've got everything working perfectly except for the fullscreen demo mode and logging out feature. When either of these are used they do what they should but then the computers freeze and nothing but a reboot will restore access to them again. Has anyone encountered this error before? I've been through the iTALC wiki but there's nothing on there so I presume it's either a problem we're having in the suite or an undocumented problem with the current version. Does anyone have any suggestions that I can try to stop these features from freezing the computers?

Another plus one to that idea. We set Xibo up in the entrance in our school and it's gone down a treat! Used an Acer Revo (nice and compact). Works perfect.

I had a similar problem to this before and it was related to the global template. In my case the computer in question was trying to access a global template on the network. When I restored it to the local template it worked fine.

Funnily enough I've got a member of staff who has just encountered this exact same problem. But not only does the print preview crash; just clicking the print button brings up an error about the printer not being connected or the default setup. When I've already checked and tested that it is. Seems to be a fault with the users account in Sims rather than the PC itself. I've also tried reinstalling Sims, changing the default printer and setting the macro level in Excel to low, but nothing has worked. I'm currently waiting for our Sims support team to get back to me with a solution.

... Also I didn't know San Andreas had fire engine missions! I usually just spend my time cruising around or playing taxi driver. Time to dig out the old PS2!

This is a great article. Too often the media is full of "video games are evil" articles and it's nice to see that actually people do find some good in them.

Add another vote for Heroes and Voyager. How about Alias? That's not been suggested so far and is one of my favourite tv series.

I've played briefly with Spiceworks and it looks like a decent piece of software. If you're prepared to have a fiddle with config files and know a bit about Linux there's a similar application called Nagios that monitors network attached devices. We use it in our school and once you get it set up it's pretty effective. As it's community driven there's also a lot of customizable checks you can set up.