Tricky_Dicky

The nice thing about Cisco is the training courses they offer and the brand name means there are quite a few people who are well trained to use their equipment. That being said, IMO they don't offer anything that unique from any other supplier, but they do offer a very wide range of products so not only networking, but phones, cctv and pretty much anything in between. Like you say, no one ever got fired for buying Cisco, just like IBM back in the day Rich

Anyone can download it from: Here as long as they have a Live account. Ironically it wouldn't download in IE8 for me, had to use Firefox.

Installed it and love it. Very attractive looking upgrade and so quick! Will now be trying to convince the powers that be to let me do a big upgrade of all machines to Windows 7 and Office 2010 next summer as well as Server 2008 upgrades Rich

Having bought a house not to long ago the better half finds many jobs for me to fill up my weekends but when I'm not putting up shelves I do ballroom dancing and have done for about the past 14 years.

With you now, thank you. I wasn't looking close enough. Cheers

Coloumn M? It doesn't have any spaces, just centre aligned. Is that what you mean? Rich

Hi, I'm trying to get a table to do a vlookup and it isn't working right. When I enter a number in cell 5c it is picking up the wrong data from the array but I can't see why, can anyone help? Cheers Rich Speaking and listening.xls

I saw that advert as well, I think it was one of the big supermarkets and Argos? And to be fair, I would get one at that sort of price because unless you are really into your films and have the latest hi-def all singing and dancing TV you won't tell the difference. And what ever you do, don't buy a £25+ HDMI cable, it's pointless, by a £5 one from Maplins/Supermarket it will do exactly the same job.

That's great, thanks guys. Just need to rename the external drive to U then and hopefully all should be well Rich

Hi, My much loathed Admin server runs a schedule task every saturday to an external hard drive. Said hard drive died and so I've replaced it with a new one while waiting for a proper backup solution to come in. The following script is called and I would just like to know is the U:\ at the end the drive letter the external HDD should be? If anyone can shed any light on what the rest of it means that would be great. Cheers Rich

Hi all, I've got redirected start menu and desktops for users and the only two option are log off or shutdown which is great. The problem is when they click shut down it still brings up the windows shutdown box which allows them to restart/standby/log off. How do I disable that second box so it just does what the user clicked in the first place? Cheers Rich

When you try to log on to the machine which error message is coming up? Is it "Can't find the domain" or "computer account doesn't exist"? I'm just thinking, if you have had a major overhaul of the network, it might be that the domain accounts just haven't been properly recreated in the correct OU and hence they can't be found. It might be worth trying a PCI wireless adaptor as well because they will normally initialize on start up. I've got one PC on wireless though and I have to say it's a bit flaky. I'd be surprised if it was the AP, Just check it hasn't got any sort of MAC filtering or user filtering on it. Rich

If it is Intel, don't remove it altogether. In Add/Remove do a modify and just select to uninstall everything but the driver itself. Found that one out the 30 laptops later way....

Which 3rd party software is it? When you updated the GPOs did you run both a gpupdate on the server and then a few minutes later a gpupdate /force on the laptop? I always try and do this when I'm getting weird problems and always over a wired connection. Rich

Hi, You are using the Windows to control the wireless card in the laptop aren't you? Most 3rd party ones won't do pre-log on authentication unless told too. In your AD have you got the Laptops in their own OU and if so have you told them to wait for the network to be ready before logging on? Rich

Cheers Penfold, I've passed on the thoughts to the powers that be. I did some digging around and because the language we were looking for are not European then it would have been very expensive to purchase any software anyway.

Hi, I've just been asked to try and find some translation software so the office can send out letters to parents who don't speak English. I've looked at Babelfish and Google translate but they don't cover the languages that we need which are Urdu, Somali and Arabic. Does anyone know of any good one's? Cheers Rich

Our year 1s and 2s are more than capable of logging in themselves and under some direction can find what program the teacher wants them to work with. I haven't been working in schools long but with most of the children I've seen it is a case of show them once, maybe twice and away you go. I think the problem may well be convincing the teachers or TAs to let the kids have a go. Rich

Thanks for all the replies, some really interesting reading. Update: Our LA have been excellent in helping to restore to the last backup that was taken remotely, so fair play to them and I really can't fault them in this instance. I think the problem here lies with the company I purchased the server off and their support people. That's what I'm thinking. The server is 3 years old, so would it make a difference then? As long as they brought along the correct sized hard drive in the first place it should have just worked. Good point, well made. In hindsight I would have taken another backup before letting the service company touch it. It houses CMIS and all the office type stuff, so very important. A remote backup is taken every night by the LA which in this instance worked really well in restoring the data. Being as CMIS is a database system is there some way of running backups during the day while people are still in the system? For example to another server on site or something like that? Cheers for the help so far people. Rich

Hi, Our Admin Server is looked after by the local authority people and is under warranty from the approved supplier. It showed a degraded hard drive on Thursday and as such we got the hardware people out to look at it. They brought a fresh hard drive with them thinking that was the problem but when they arrived found that it wouldn't rebuild and as such took it back to the workshop to look at leaving us with no Admin Server. It has now been returned and all the data entered from the point the RAID showed it was degraded to the point where they took it away has been lost (2 days worth). The excuse being given is that it was the primary hard drive that has failed and as such then it's tough luck and do we have a back up from which to restore? This will only give us back 1 days work as it wasn't run again before the server was taken away. I would love someone to correct my thinking that the idea of a mirrored RAID is that it doesn't matter which hard drive fails the other one still has all the info and it can be resotred from it. Do you think the idiots have cloned the failed hard drive? Sorry for the long post Rich

Hi, We have a temporary (15 years ago) classroom which is about 30 metres away from the main building. It is split in to 3 rooms, 2 of which are normal small teaching rooms and the 3rd is a community room which can be used by various members of the community for meetings and the like. I have been asked to put some computers in there so the community side of things can help people with job hunting and improve their work skills, however I am very reluctant to provide network/internet access to it for fear of viruses or any other type of attack on the schools network. So I'm basically asking would you put them in? Would you allow network access and if so how would you keep it secure? I've got a Ruckus wireless system and all Cisco switches if that makes a difference. If I was to go down the route of putting some sort of network connection in there I would like to be able to provide connection both for the community and for our teaching staff. Any ideas gratefully received. Rich

Have you tried the free version of Big Brother? Have never implemented it myself but have seen it used and it's very good. Rich

Have you tried using the HP easy care software? If you have a few different HP printers it will keep track of them any tell you of any problems. SM - HP Easy Printer Care Software- overview and features Rich

I think the model you are planning will work well. We currently run a Curriculum server (logins, home drives, etc) and an Admin server(Cmis and the like). Both are DCs and it works well. We are just about to put in a separate storage server, the Intel SSR212MC2RBR Storage Server which should be adequate for all of our storage needs. I looked at virtualisation and thought it was just overkill for what we needed. Rich

The beauty of using something like Mhythbuntu is that it should provide a central NAS as well is that right? Which would save having to buy one at a later date. With the above in mind, what sort of hardware would you put at the backend then? Cheers Rich