Tricky_Dicky

I'm rapidly running out of room on one of our servers and as such I was hoping to add an additional Hard Drive in the last available bay. Basically can this be done? It's an NEC R120a with I believe an Intel Raid card. Cheers Rich

We currently use Complete imaging, mainly because they are based near the school and so should respond faster... To be honest, have a google around and see what comes up. Might be worth asking your LEA to see if they use someone to get a better deal. i.e. if the LEA have 100 photocopiers you will get a better deal than if you just have 2.

Cheers for the info on that. We have looked at groups, but even though each teacher is doing a similar thing they like to have separate classes so they can have different discussions and things like that. Rich

That's great, cheers for that. I'm trying to convince the teachers to use Hot Potato quizes because then when it's saved they can just import it on to which ever course they want.

Hi all, I'm trying to setup some new teacher laptops using Windows 7 and having fun with one user and her offline files. Basically, the option to make available offline is not available on her H: (home) drive and yet is available on all the other mapped drives. It only seems to be this user that is affecting because the other teachers have it working fine. Any ideas as I'm tearing my hair out trying to find things to compare? Rich

I agree with SimpleSi. Our last lot of photocopiers were 3-5 years old and constantly getting problems so we took out a new contract with some much better machines and because it is such a competitive market ended up with a really good price. To control the printing from the client end we use Papercut

Hi, We have 3 classes per year group which work on the same topic at the same time and as such would like to share resources. I've just been asked if there is a way to setup a quiz once in one course and then import/insert it in to the other courses. Does anyone know if this can be done? Rich

Hi James and welcome along, The easiest way I've found is the first time a user goes to use iMovie if they just got to their home directory, right click and create new folder called Movies and that will sort it. It should inherit the permissions from the containing folder and so you won't need to modify anything. Rich (fellow BGFL sufferer)

I think that will probably be your problem regardless of what you implement. A VLE is only as good as the information put in to it by the teachers and then in repsonse by the pupils. You could put in the greatest VLE ever known that does everything they could want, but unless the head leads by saying I want this used and then explaining why you will be fighting a loosing battle. Having said that, if you want a good VLE then Moodle is great and with the right plugins from people such as Salamandersoft it will intergrate with your MIS to provide reporting to parents and you can also implement linking to storage with the school and SSO if you would like. Rich

Hi, I've just been checking through the security on our network and internally the client machine firewalls are turned off via a GPO. This is how it was setup when the city approved contractor installed the system years ago but just seems a bit wierd to me. Now, having had a look there are two different profiles available. "Standard Profile" and "Domain Profile" and I was just wondering if anyone knew what the difference was? Cheers Rich

Congratulations. How did you propose?

Yes, our local one closed it's doors to students last Friday. What's bothering me is what is going to happen to the equipment? I know of one CLC that has just bought 130 iPads!

XP has got a share limit of 10 clients so you will need to either use a Microsoft Server product of Linux. Educational pricing for server is very good and you might find it easier to do it that way. 3s-gtechs solution would be perfect for you.

Will these files be accessed regualrly and by quite a few users simultaneously or is it more for archiving? Reason I ask, if you want to just dump some files on it then any cheap NAS will do the job. this Netgear looks good. If you want it to be used quite a bit, then a simple file server out of a basic PC will be better and just throw in a load of Hard Drives and put Simplefiller on it. Rich

I think Adobe Elements is the movie editing software, so... unless you are planning on editing movies then go with just photoshop elements. It's a nice bit of software, I'm just not a fan of the interfaces it presents. However it's a fraction of the price of full on CS5 and can do almost everything a normal photographer will need. Rich

If you have Outlook Web access enabled then you just point it to that address and away you go. On the phone it's settings -> Mail -> Add Account and choose Exchange.

Agree on the avoid fixed lense cameras. You will reach it's limits very quickly and then have to replace the entire camera rather than just a lense. For £350 you can get a Canon EOS1000D with Lense. Nice entry level camera if that's all you have to spend. If you can spend a bit more it would be well worth looking at the 450D.I know Jessops do 0% over 12 months.

Just a warning before I begin, this hobby can get very expensive very easily and quickly. That said, it's loads of fun. A proper DSLR will have interchangeable lenses otherwise it's just a compact camera. In my opinion you basically have two choice of makes, Nikon or Canon, the war between these two is not dissimilar to the row between windows and macs so the best bit of advice I can give is go and have a play with some and see which one you prefer in terms of look, feel and very importantly how well the menu system works. If you need to grab a shot very quickly and can't set the camera up in time then it's not worth buying. Most (think all) SLRs in the starter bracket will have a built in flash which is about on par with the flash on most compacts so if you are going to be doing any internal work or night time stuff where you will need extra light then try and get an external flash. Again both Nikon and Canon do some excellent equipment depending on budget. Try and avoid gimick features, I can not see the point in a swivel out screen, it just looks to me like it will get broken off. You want a camera that feels substantial in your hand, well made and takes a nice photo. You can improve a SLR easily with better lenses, but obviously this starts to get expensive. For an idea in price, I bought a Canon 40D 3 years ago for about £1000, I've since bought a 580EX11 flash gun and a 24-70f2.8 lense which has made an average camera in to a nice bit of kit. Next step is a Canon 5DMk2. Try out Warehouse Express for some very good pricing. Have fun, Rich

Do you mind telling me where you got that from? I've just been quoted £30.80 per stick for 20 sticks.

Will do, thanks for the warning.

Thanks for all the replies. I'm going to put an extra Gb in to them all and I think that will be a happy medium between price and performance.

I was just wondering that

Just standard DDR-400 PC-3200. They are pretty old machines. When did you buy that as the price of memory seems to be going through the roof at the moment?

I've got about 20 older machines which I'm hoping to put back in to service. They are 3Ghz Pentium 4's and currently have 512Mb of RAM. How much do you think I should put in? Another 512 stick is about £18, a gig stick is £33 (prices from scan ex VAT). We are currently running XP but hoping to upgrade to Windows 7 in the foreseeable future. Rich

Our big problem is where to physically put the machines. Being as we are a primary it's not like we have seperate rooms for things like this and we seem to have grown very fast to which I'm fighting a loosing battle to keep up with machines and also keep them under control. I've seen thos flip up one and they look awesome but it would mean fixing a classroom to a specific layout which probably wouldn't work. I don't really fancy getting loads of new laptops as they are becoming harder and harder to maintain on my own. Rich