farquea

Im looking for a power strip without really knowing what they are called, im guesasing smart power strips? Ive heard of these strips that will kill the power to every device plugged into it once the power to a "master" plug socket is killed. So i would have my pc plugged in the master so that my monitor and everything else will be swtiched off once my PC is turned off. Im therefore assuming that i just then switch my pc on with the usual power button on the case, PC switches on and then everything else like monitor will just need the usual button on the unit on too? i wont need to switch anything on the strip? (the strip is going to be hidden away behind a TV so dont want to forced to dig behind every morning. So can someone confirm what these are called and where i can get them etc?

I need to completely remove all trace of a pci device as i suspect its lingering remenants are causing a conflict with another card which causes it to blue screen. Ive tried searching for the individual driver files and deleting them but when i plug the old card in, in device manager it still knows what type of card it is and its name but it just comes up with the yellow ! as it cant install it properly, probably because i delted some of the river files. So can someone tell me how i can completely remove all referance to the old device so its is completely clear of it?

We are looking to purchase some new PC's for our Music room, looking at 6-11 depending on the budget but just wondered if anyone could reccommend anything. We need something reasonably powerful to run Music apps such as Cubase which i believe becomes a bit of a resource hog but at the same time ideally something small as possible space is limited. Dell would be nice too as we have Dell around the rest of the school.

another motherboard? i dont think that is the problem but i guess the test would be to install another pci device such as a sound card and see what happens?

thanks, that was my next step but i just thought it was a bit of a non-starter as i couldnt see us sending the board back for repair via royal mail given how big they are! But ill get in touch and see what they say.

its an older server, with 1 pci slot and 2 pci-x slots which support normal pci. Like i said it detects the card and installs the drivers and works fine... until you reboot.

We have 2 boards which are faulty, the pens dont track properly. They are out of warranty so does anyone know if its worth looking to have them repaired or is it more a case of its cheaper to just buy new ones as i imagine theres not a whole lot in them which can be changed?

I'm having a nightmare and wondered if anyone could offer advice as im not sure where to go next with this problem! The background is that the serial port on the server in the dining hall has was blown when a com device broke. As a solution we have got a new device but needed a new serial port so got one for free from a IT company near us. We plugged it in but it didnt appear to be working properly, the card reader was not reading the card properly as it wasnt picking up all the data off the card. So we purchased a brand new StarTech 2 port serial card. Installed that, drivers go on fine, everything gets configured and works but then when you reboot the server it just blue screens when you get to the logon screen. If you then boot in safe mode it doesnt blue screen but the serial card doesnt appear anywhere in device manager. I've tried it in 3 different pci slots, with the latest drivers, and even made an effort to track down and delete the drivers of the first faulty card we tried incase there is some sort of conflict but still it blue screens after installing and restarting. I've disabled the onboard serial port incase of a conflcit there and doesn't make a difference, it looks like a hardware conflcit of some sort but im really stuck with what to try next, maybe another card but i cant get hold of one so will need another new one buying without the guarentee it will work. Can anyone suggest anything as im running out of ideas fast!

We are planning to have a machine hooked up to a TV to display powerpoints. We want to be able to configure and update it remotely so RDP isnt going to work. Would anyone know a free piece of remote software like RealVNC etc. We would only need it on the 1 machine if that makes a difference? The only free thing i can think of is Logmein but with that being over the internet id rather not use it.

We are having trouble with what i think are DNS issues which is causing problems with staff not being able to use NetSupport. The problem is we have recently re-imaged a few rooms in the school, for example the library on Monday morning. On NetSupport it is set to search for clients in that OU which start with the hostname "R21" so when it should find 30+ it currently only picks up 1 (r20-21) if i open up a CMD prompt and ping R20-21 i get responses as expected. However if i ping any of the other computers in the room by hostname it fails to resolve the name but will work if you ping by IP. So im no expert but it sounds as if DNS is not working properly and not updating like it should. So my question is how do i get the teachers pc updated to be able to ping and contact all the pc's (ideally in the school) by hostname? We work with a managed service so im not going to be able to make any high level changes so i want to know exactly what to tell them when i report this or else they will take their normal 3 months "investigating" no doubt.

its definitely RAID 1, i know that its just that it refuses to boot pas the raid configuration screen with only the 1 working drive in (which im assuming it should do providing everything on that 1 drive is fine) and everything ive tried to rebuild the array it doesnt want to do it so im assuming the whole things is cocked up and isnt going to be a simple array rebuild

We have a RAID 1 setup on one of our servers. One of the drives on it has gone BOOM but at the same time as it was failing we noticed that the windows install seems to of been corrupted (random errors) features missing/not working properly and thinks not looking right. Anyway we have swapped the drives (Original was a maxtor but the one we've been sent by our support company is a WD) my understanding is as long as they are the same szie drives it should be a problem. However with the new drive plugged in, if we try to rebuild the array it wont let us and brings up a general error with some reasons why ie this might be a RAID 0, the drive sizes are not same etc. But if we just try and boot the server with the 1 working HD it wont pass the RAID screen and says the RAID is missing and cant load windows which i assume isnt good as surely the point of a RAID 1 is that should 1 drive fail and be removed the server should still use the other drive to boot right? So my question is am i missing something or does it sound like the raid needs recreating and windows reinstalling?

Yeah sorry using Exchange, forgot to mention that.

The heads PA wants to be able to see and create contacts for the Head. I know how to set it up for her to be able to see his contacts but dont know how she can then create new contacts for him. Can this be done and if so how?

Our head wants a tv setting up in our staffroom to display notices and announcements. We've got the tv but can anyone reccomend how we would go about this, we were thinknig of hooking up an old pc to do it or are there any pieces of hardware that would be better? and then yeah any ideas of what software we can use to do this? Any help would be great!

the problem is though that this has been raised from a governers meeting, so what im really asking i suppose is, do hit counters only take into account unique ip's as a hit (therefore meaning the school will only be responsbile for 6) or count the number of hits from the same ip address as a hit so effectivly it can be counting 500 hits from the same ip address each day?

The old head requested every computer in the school to have our website as the home page. The new head now is asking that this be changed as the "hit count" for our website is not accurate because of this. Am i right in thinking that the hit count from our school will only be 6 different ip addresses (our LEA has 6 smoothwall servers i think) and obviously not count every visit to the page on every single computer in the school? Or are some hit counters designed to count the amount of times the website is visited regardless of whether its from the same ip address or not?

We have a problem with powerpoint. When you load the program, if you then go to print as soon as you click print its pops up a warning box to say no printers are installed and so you cannot even get to the print screen where you select which printer and hit "ok" to print. There are 2 network printers installed but powerpoint will only recognise that they are there if i go into the printers and set the other printer to default then suddenly you click print in powerpioint and it now knows there are 2 printers and then you can print. I dont think this has been an issue before because that stupid XPS printer has always been lingering but we removed it from a new build. Has anyone come accross this before or knows what is going on here?

the user profile its appearing in is the Administrator, which is obviously why its then forcing the printer to every user who logs on in any school either locally or on the network. So the question is how do i reset the Admin profile? cos im assuming you cant just delete the user profile.

client server 2003. Thinking about it i think when i created the image i made it with it still sitting in the room 91 OU, so it had both room 91 printers in the printer list. I think thats where they came from but i would still of expected that if they were deleted from the image that when they were put into a new OU that they should only map the printers for that OU and not the 2 from 91 which it would not be sat in. confusing i know, sorry!

We have a problem with one of our desktop student images. It lists 2 network printers in the school. If i ghost the image to a desktop the first time you log on the printers are there, even tho im logging on locally and they are not in the corresponding classroom OU anyway. If you delete them, reboot, even with the network cable out and logging back on locally they re-add themsevles. So somewhere in the image there seems to be something to force these printers to be installed and added. This has caused trouble as the image was deployed before noticing this so now it sets one of these 2 printers it shouldnt have installed as default so the poor IT teacher is getting half the school printing to his printer by accident every day. Before i contemplate creating a new image from fresh (which will be a big job) i wondered if anyone knew where in windows there may be a link or reference to these 2 printers that i can remove so that they are gone for good?

We intend to purchase 3 or 4 new laptops for staff, so they dont need to be NASA esque mean machines that will play Crysis at 100fps. We are looking at something around £300 give or take per unit and not netbooks. Wondered if anyone had made a similar purchase or knew of any recommendations? Cant really think of any brands we wouldnt consider so we're pretty open to most ideas.

just got round to checking and it prints out and just tells you whether or not the admin password is set or not, not what the password is. So im still locked out of the thing

the kitchen has a card register?? to register new students' dinner swipe cards. Its suddnely stopped working but im struggling to work out if its a problem with the server or the device itself. It is a COM device that is basically a grey block that has a power plug attached to it and a cable to the com port. there are rather helpfully no lights on it to tell you the thing is switched on and working, and it doesnt make any noise either. So does anyone know of a way i can test to see if the device is actually working because i think i am right in saying if you unplug it windows will still list it as a com device in device manager and wont alert you that the device isnt present? Can anyone suggest anything to try before we buy a new one, although ive no idea what they are even called or where they are sold!

i know how to do that but i want to change the hostname and the only way i know to do that is by going through the embedded interface which is password protected. I've even used Web Jet Admin which looks as if it lets me change or remove the password but then when i go to it again the password is still there so thats why i want to completely reset it to factory defaults.