Tricky_Dicky

I looked at that one but thought for a little 20" bedroom TV it just wasn't worth it. I might upgrade the RAM in mine to 2 or 4Gb though to help it along a bit. Any idea what RAM it takes? The FreeNAS is an awesome piece of software but I really like WHS, the extra plugins are lovely and the easy remote access is awesome. Rich

Just put a USB tuner in the side of it, it's what I'm going to do. Think a single tuner version is about £20 which is enough for a bedroom but if you wanted more the R3600 has 6 usb ports

If anyone already has a main media centre or WHS and is looking for a simple client then this Acer Aspire Revo Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer is a bargain. Comes with Linux on it but you can put anything on it and it happily runs Media Centre and will stream hi def. Have just put one in the bedroom and the other half loves the fact she can now watch Desperate Housewives in bed. Rich

Something like thisQuad Vision Multi-Screen LCD Stands VT2

The 'n' wireless solution is backwards compatible with b/g so all of your old equipment will work fine it just means that the newer stuff can take full advantage of the extra range and speed. Rich

I personally like the Toshiba NB200s netbooks. Small, well made, webcam and excellent battery life. For the PC's the one's where they sit on a cradle at the back are probably best due to being a normal PC where you can easily service them if needed. Rich

Houses are sold very much on a "buyer beware" sort of condition. It is up to the purchaser to do all the relevant checks to see if things are as they appear, if you discover something is wrong once you have purchased then I'm afraid that's just hard luck. That being said, it shouldn't make a huge amount of difference if the house has been rewired unless the old wiring is in a particularly poor state of repair. You should still be able to add new sockets from the existing as long as it's done by a qualified electrician and comes with a part-p.

I use Tempus for a lot of stuff. They aren't perfect but they have pretty good support and have a decent amount of technicians for on site stuff. Steve Buet is the main contact - 0121 233 3100

I've been getting the exact same message. I went to log the call with Link2ICT and then when the tech remoted in to have a look it worked! Grrrr. I'm guessing something is up at there end.

I agree with TimZim, it shouldn't be hard for them to add a new DC and set it up how you want. Regards logins, you can have as many or as few as you want really. So a generic login for Teachers/Students would be fine. Beauty of doing this is that you can have the home drive map easily for them. Good luck

Hi Martin, In my opinion if you are going to the expense of buying a new Server then you might as well put it on a domain. I presume all the sites are linked via some sort of VPN? If so then just make them all members of the domain and away you go. You could order a resonable server with enough storage space for all of your documents and just map them as shared drives which using your DC you can role our quite easily. I'm pretty sure most suppliers on here would happily quote for installing/configuring that sort of setup. Rich

LeMarchand, I hate it when there "friend who is a computer expert (obviously much better than you but is out of a job atm because of x,y,z) said....". I think in this case it was probably caused by her kids using it. Also had the cheek to blame me for it and the best bit, she has cancelled all of her credit cards/banking because it came up with a message saying they were being transmitted by MSN!

It's dam good! I can't open Sophos, Add/Remove programs or even task manager. Just going into Safe mode now.

Hi all, Just had a teacher come to me with her laptop and say it's got 33 infections on it and can I sort it before the day is out? This is the school laptop which is taken home and so has Sophos on it as do all of our machines and it's very rare for Sophos to actually alert the user to anything strange, it just gets on with it's job so I asked her what she had been doing with it/ had she used some other anti-virus. I got the reply of "yes, I've used a 3rd party bit of software". great... Turned the laptop on and up pops "Security Tool" which then proceeds to do what looks like the fastest full system scan in history and tells me that the computer is full of infections even though sophos reckons it's fine. It even recreates the little red warning shield in the taskbar to say there is a problem. Now before I delete this software and let Sophos carry on, is there any chance it's legit or has anyone used it before? Regards Rich

A Massive thank you to everyone who has commented on this thread! It's been really interesting listening to everyones opinions. I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) but the general concessus is that Macs are very nice doing what they do (iLife, comics etc) but they are not the be all and end all of IT problems and in fact create several of their own so think things through carefully before buying them. Just before everyone gets bored of the topic I was just wondering what experience people had with dual booting the Macs to give the best of both worlds. I'm starting to think this might be the way forward. Thanks again Rich

Only some of the 2Simple range is available online at the moment, I'm hoping and waiting that they will all become available online.

We're getting the 20" iMac for education, £600 a piece which I thought was pretty good. The server will only be handling policies, all storage/processing will be done through the existing AD I think. Cheers RinSewand, Can the mini be the imaging server as well? Obviously the images would be held on a storage server for space.

That's a serious consideration we are looking at. They certainly aren't cheap. The current range of eduactional programs for the macs are slim but is increasing. The 2Simple range which our teachers use a lot are all slowly being transfered over to both platforms however I don't know how long it will take. For locking them down we are getting a mac mini server, I've used macs for a few years but only as a desktop user, never admin so I'm getting some training from the company who are quoting us for installing them. They are also including a staff inset day for the staff, but how many will listen is a different matter. Hadn't thought about the re-imaging. Is it massively more difficult? How are you intergrating with AD? Have you put Office for Mac on them or gone for iWork? Cheers for the input so far. Rich

Hi, Looking for opinions really. Do you think it would be a good idea to have a Mac suite in a primary school? Basically. We have a 3:1 ratio of laptops to students which are PC and we are looking for ways to really improve the ICT and after introducing some macbooks and seeing how well they were received we are thinking of installing 30 iMacs to really push the kids (and teachers). As anyone done this in a primary or seen it done, what has been the outcome? Thanks Rich

That looks fantastic. Shockingly bad video though

Yes we are. I was wondering about that. I hate politics! Ah well, it was worth looking into. I just sometimes feel that Link2ICT aren't putting the schools users first and that it often boils down to cost savings which I know are important but it bothers me when a childs education has a price put against it. That isn't to say that I expect any amount of money to be thrown at things I would just like things to be best value. Take the SIP project, we have some lovely Cisco switches but not exactly connected well and it does make you think did someone just go with Cisco because no one gets fired for it? Rich

What's NEN? For webfiltering I was looking at Smoothwall and bringing in the entire package for filtering/antivirus. Rich

Hi all, Basically I'm looking at what Link2ICT provide for us and the amount they charge and I'm wondering if it's actually good value for money and in the best interests of the school. They currently provide, Internet, Policy Central, Sophos, CMIS support and remote backup for £12500 pa. Does anyone know if it's possible to actually "leave" BGFL and go it alone, so bring in my own firewall, antivirus and internet connection and if so would it be worth it? Any thoughts greatly appreciated. Rich

I run a good Curriculum server that handles DHCP, DNS,AD, Printing and most file storage. Then a second Administrator server that also runs DNS and AD and CMIS. Just purchased a good NAS for file storage because of the amount of photos/videos being generated recently. I did look at virtualising it all a little while ago but with the extra servers and for what actual application processing we do it just isn't worth it. It's a large primary, 740 kids, 60+dektops, 150 laptops plus staff laptops but I find that it's rare that everything is logged on at once. The big thing I have issues with it the amount of rubbish flash based software we have to run on the network and over the internet and so I'm trying to improve out network before anything else. The school was SIPped before I started with some lovely Cisco switches however it's got a 100Mb back bone which just isn't enough when you have that amount of data running over it. Hope my ramblings help Rich

As jsnetman said, Windows Deployment Toolkit is purely a way of setting everything up, such as image properties and unattend.xml files so you can do unattended installs. The Windows Deployment Service is the service which allows you to then deploy said images onto various machines. From what I can figure out the two work together and if you can realise the full potential offer a very impressive way of mass deploying Windows 7 exactly the way you want on to lots of different machines. Rich