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A part-time ICT technician is required for immediate start to join our developing ICT dept. Working alongside our current technician and Network Manager, the role will be first line support and all that that entails. This is an entry level position but some experience with customer-facing IT support would be preferred. Further details can be found at our website: Vacancies | Tormead Salary will be in the £17-18k range. Deadline is Midday on Wed 7th November. Thanks.

There seems to be a few apps for iPads coming out that allegedly improve access to Moodle sites? anyone got any experience? Jon

Required January 2012 or as soon as possible thereafter. A suitably qualified and experienced IT professional is required for this full-time, permanent post to oversee the school's computer networks and manage the school's ICT support staff. Relevant school experience is desirable. Salary will be according to experience (likely to be in the £34-38k range). Full details and an application form may be obtained by contacting the Headmistress's PA by email [email protected] or by telephone 01483 796091. Closing date is Monday 21st November. (Apologies for short notice, would have posted last week but problems with Edugeek, etc...)

Call Chris Figge at Panacea IT (01737 244500, Reigate), tell him your requirements and ask for the installers from ProTech solutions. They stuff they've done for us (we're based near Guildford) in the past few years has been absolutely A1.

AB Tutor used here - fairly cheap and licensed by number of administrative users (i.e. techies) rather than clients.

Is it the software/apps that you need help with or the hardware? Have you thought of iMac for Dummies (no offence intended!)

I've had a lot of success with free version of Advanced Installer Free Windows Installer - MSI Installer Tool although haven't tried it on Win7...

Have you checked that it's not set via the local policy? if the local policy is set, and the GPO(s) are "Not configured", then it will keep the local policy setting.

We've also experienced this and found it would print ok from my laptop (Win7 64bit) but not from the student workstations (XP SP3 32bit)... never really got to the bottom of it...

If you're going to be running a Citrix client, why not just keep the computers you have? Or buy a job lot of older computers that have the bare minimum spec required.

Have you tried swapping a different HD into the machine to see if it runs any better?

ABTutor is another fairly cheap implementation AB Tutor Control | ABTutor | Classroom Management Software | PC Remote Access | ESafety. Then there's a whole slew of VNC derivatives.. some of which are more secure than others...

Not education-specific, but you may be able find something here: Home - iT4Communities

We have 2 identical iMacs, approx 18 months old, bought at the same time with the same hardware, same software and same version of OSX. We also have an Epson Stylus Photo 1400, that we connect locally to each Mac, depending on which we want to print from. When we connect it to one, everything works fine and the print-outs come out quickly. When we connect to the other, the print-outs come out really slow... they almost stutter out, like the job is buffering. We've checked everything that is suggested in the usual places, drivers, printer settings, document settings, etc but to no avail. Has anyone else experienced/solved something like this?

I normally run distances between 10k - half marathon. Currently training for a 10-miler in 2 weeks time. All of which I suppose qualifies me as a keen runner...

Lock the door??

With the seemingly huge number of conferences/events/trade shows now available for people working in IT/education or with particular vendors, how do you stay informed of any that may be of interest? I've found a couple of times over the past few months I have come across events that I would have like to attended had I known about them in advance. Do you rely on word of mouth on sites such as this, or direct emails from vendors, or is there some other trick that I'm missing?

We were told on a recent ISI inspection that we need to have SIMS backups going back 3 years, which was a bit of a heart-stopper! We now archive a monthly SIMS backup onto a DVD and store it in the safe.

There has been a huge discussion about this website on the HMC mailing list. Various actions have been taken up to and including contacting CEOP to try and get the site taken down as it is completely irresponsible.

Microsoft offer a lot of "basic" Office 2010 training materials (Training - Microsoft Office). Could you use or adapt some of those?

In terms of resolving issues that you are paid to do, I'd agree with the "get a helpdesk" advice. Everyone will report their issue as the most urgent but I try to use the principle of Urgent vs Important (Google it). For me that helps get things into some semblance of order. Report to your boss that this is what you're doing and that obviously you'll get stuff done as quickly as you can. Not only will it help, but you'll come across as being proactive and not just someone who complains but does nothing to help resolve the problem. As for being asked to do things that aren't in your job desc, you have to explain firmly but honestly that you don't have the time. Most people will be understanding if you're honest with them and will respect you more for saying No than for saying Yes and failing/forgetting. If anyone does get humpy, tell them to speak to your boss who should back you up if you've kept him/her in the loop. You don't have to stop being friendly to people, just let people know that you're busy. Oh, and don't forget your downtime at the end of the day/week. Helps to keep things in perspective.

There is a GPO setting for it - obviously you have to get the Office 2010 GPO adm files and the setting you need to enable is located in User Policies\Admin Templates\Microsoft Office 2010\Miscellaneous\Supress Recommended Settings Dialog.

A VBscript targetted at all user accounts in the OU would accomplish this quite easily: 'Bind to the relevant OU Set objOU = GetObject("LDAP://ou=OUNAME,dc=DOMAINNAME") 'Filter the OU contents into an array of users objOU.Filter = Array("user") 'Read the logon name For Each objUser In objOU strDisplayName = objUser.Get("sAMAccountName") 'Set the display name to be the same as the logon name objUser.Put "displayName", strDisplayName objUser.SetInfo Next This was written in haste - please excuse any errors. I suggest testing it on an OU with a single account first. No warranty is implied or given, etc, etc, etc...

Anyone know how to change the page layout options in Word 2010 for a whole bunch of machines at once? Specifically, the default "Line Spacing" (of 1.15 back to single) and the "Spacing After" (from 10pt to 0). It's easy enough to do for a single machine and then change the normal.dot but I was hoping there'd be a group policy setting or even a registry hack for doing it to a room's worth of machines at once it and I can't find anything...

Depending on your server OS, you should look at Robocopy. It's a command line tool and I've previously used it to transfer a few hundred GB of staff data from one server to another. Different switched allow you to retain permissions, delete source data after copy, etc, etc...