gerardsweeney

Hard pass, I'm afraid. If the speakers are mains powered with a transformer, I've no earthly idea how they get their power. They're what were fitted as standard in all of the rooms when the school was built 24 years ago. I'll catch up with the colleague who's primarily responsible for this kind of thing, and see what he actually said about the mini unit you mentioned. They're off on annual leave just now - hence my slightly fumbling in the dark about the whole thing

I'm sure one of my colleagues had tried one of these, and said that they were underpowered for the ceiling speakers. Pity. Thanks for the suggestion, though..

Sorry for the delayed response, folks. So most cases it's just the PC connecting to the amp via a 3.5mm stereo to 2x phono. In a few, they have standalone DVD/bluray players connected the same way - so more than 1 input would be handy, but not a deal breaker. The amps then have a left pair of speaker cables and a right pair. They connect to a wall panel, which goes to the relevant ceiling based speakers. Budget? Less than what Richer quoted us. Ideally double figures, rather than triple Amazon could be problematic, thanks to the ... "firm" (shall we say) control our Procurement department have. The CPC one looks interesting. I take it the speaker cables attach to that terminal block, so the PC would connect to the AUX via a 3.5mm to 3.5mm stereo cable. My only concern is the lack of BT/AUX selection... "The audio from Bluetooth always got the 1st priority, even if your Aux-In audio source still hook-up to this In-wall amplifier. Once people switch off the Bluetooth from their cellphone, otherwise music always comes from Bluetooth" Which - to my untrained mind - means that they device sits in a state of being discoverable. Meaning pupils could pair their phone to the device, and override the Teacher's audio. Or am I overthinking this?

Urgh... that's killing me! I'm basically looking to see if anyone can recommend a budget amp.

All.. We have multiple Promethean classrooms where the PCs are connected to ceiling speakers via Promethean amplifiers. A bit like the Promethean AV-3016 if you need to look it up on EBay. The amplifiers are starting to give in after nearly 20 years worth of use (who knew?!). Can someone recommend a cheapish alternative? We contacted Richer Sounds with a similar query (including a note of the old model), who are quoting £250 for a Cambridge - I don't know if that's good/bad/indifferent. It's the same price on Amazon, if that goes for anything. They don't need to be fancy. A couple of phono inputs to speakers. The old ones say they're 100W - which'd surprise me, but what do I know?

Hi. That sounds... Ghastly. There won't be any money getting spent on it, that's for sure. When you say CSV imports - do you mean you can have a CSV of Billy Smith | smithb@blah Tom Jones | JonesT@blah And then do Billy and Tom have to create Autodesk accounts linked to those email addresses? Man... And I thought updating the licence manager on the school server every once in a while was a nuisance. This sounds like a nightmare.

Folks.. I'm assuming someone has seen this? https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/EDU-Network-and-Multi-Seat-Standalone-License-End-of-Sale-End-of-Life.html Starting December 31st, 2027, Autodesk will discontinue offering new Network and Multi-Seat Standalone (MSSA) License Education entitlements globally. Here’s a guide for IT Admins to transition to the institution named-user subscription plan. Does this mean that the long running tried and tested model of having a licence server on the LAN that the PCs talk to is out the window? Or is this referring to allowing students to download the software at home? (Which I neither know, nor care about). Cheers, Gerard

Hi, folks. One of our schools is needing to move from an old version of Photoshop Elements (6 I think) because the CD/DVD burner component it installs causes Windows 11 to barf quite spectacularly. We're not wanting them going cloud, or anything subscription-y. So my hope was to tell them to get an Enterprise version of Elements (newest version). Actually my hope was to tell them to get Affinity, and kick Adobe to the kerb - but alas.. Does such a thing exist? If so, what are they looking to buy? To be very clear - my department don't do the purchasing, we just advise them to go speak to XYX about what they're wanting. I want minimal involvement on our part with this. Ideally - like the old Elements version before it.. Punt out the installer with SCCM, and then forget about it. I don't want to have to go into some wretched Admin console, and say that billy@whatever and tommy@whatever can use it, and then have to do it all again when term changes. I just want it set so that anyone using the PCs with it installed can use it - I'm dreadfully old fashioned with that now seemingly quaint notion So... What are they looking to buy? Oh.. And we don't have SSO - if that makes any odds to answers Any help greatly appreciated!

Yikes.. that really doesn't sound promising. Do you have a link to your post? And did you find a firmware version that wasn't terrible?

I don't believe it's acting as a firewall, no. Not unless they've switched that on, and it's busy doing nothing helpful. I'll pass this onto my colleague.. Thanks for the suggestion!

A reasonably sized newly opened school was the pilot, and ran without any apparent issues for several months. The bigger primary schools and high schools were then migrated over the summer break. Nothing noticeable in the event logs. If we take the same windows 10/11 devices to a non migrated school, they work immediately. On affected devices, we can literally watch the PC trying to authenticate with the SSID. It usually just says it's unable to join.. Then eventually it'll join itself after a random interval between 5 and 15 minutes. Radius.. pass. I can ask. But the feedback we've had so far from our infrastructure team is that the Fortinet gateway (?) is running out of CPU and/or ram resources. The initial setup apparently only had it running with a single CPU, so almost no devices were connecting ever on the first couple of weeks back. Changed settings saw an improvement in that it's a large portion of devices not connecting for 5-15 minutes. Installers support - see above.. "not speedy". We're predominantly Windows based. There's a chunk of Chromebooks out there that we actively don't support - but they're having the same issues (same WAPs, different SSID, Mac addresses control access rather than certificate based like Windows)

Disclaimer: I'm a desktop admin, not infrastructure - so my phrasing here won't contain much accurate terminology - but I can obtain relevant information if required. My authority has recently moved about half of their wireless infrastructure to Fortinet.. and it's been appalling, frankly.. Windows devices take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to connect to the 8021x SSID. Fortinet support has not been 'speedy', other than diagnosing that the CPU and ram of the Fortinet gear is constantly spiking - and we only have a fraction of the WAPs that it's meant to be able to support. Has anyone else had similar experiences, and possible solutions?

I think that's perhaps what we were told as well. I gather that an alternative is purchasing a licence for non-Promethean boards at £500. They've also quoted the same for purchasing a cheaper Promethean panel (the one that's minus an Android box that absolutely nobody in my school uses). You want one of those, you need to pony up the £500. Which is - frankly - ripping the yellow water a bit.. But it's still cheaper than going for a Promethean panel. I've passed Openboard to the Education folks to look at. It's going to be met with extreme resistance, though - we've been using AS2/AI since the first ActivStudio generation. So that's over 20 years of teaching resources that'll need converted - plus everyone having to learn how to use the new product. What larks!

Oh - excellent - thanks very much. I'll go have a look, and see what those that use it have to say Gerard

£500 per seat is absolutely ripping the proverbial