localzuk

There is now a stickied thread for the corp: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/gaming/203390-eve-online-edugeek-corp-now-live-come-join-us.html#post1735765 Our corp has been invited to join a null-sec alliance, if you've not joined us yet and think this might get you to come join in, let me know!

Our corp has been invited to join a null-sec alliance, if you've not joined us yet and think this might get you to come join in, let me know!

I still feel that a lot of schools treat IT as a reluctant "must have" instead of a positive thing that can improve things. So, budget-wise, it gets the bare minimum - and that just reinforces the original view as things barely work because of it. Your projector/screen one being an example - a projector/IWB/install vs new touchscreen works out as being about equal when you take into account TCO now. The quality of the image is much higher as well, and every class I've put them in loves them much more than their old projectors - they stay bright! They are an install and forget item. But, like you @DrCheese, you are stuck putting in replacement projectors, because you don't get given the budget to think longer term about things. That attitude applies throughout school IT - IT suites, wireless, network switches, how we deploy servers, everything. A lot of schools end up stuck with the same old tech forever because they never spend more than a bare minimum on IT, so they can never consider the big picture. New schemes from the DfE don't really help either - because they focus on a mix of "ooh shiny" and "you can do this without spending any more, or even make savings!", so the old legacy stuff schools have still sits their languishing, but with the occasional shiny thing added at the edge.

Cloud saves you money just like VDI saves you money. In very specific circumstances, carefully planned out and any variation away from that plan ruins the cost savings.

We don't generally do this because: a) They will want support for it until the end of time b) Rather than just disposing of it like we normally do, we'd have to spend time restoring it to its factory license/removing volume licensed software c) If it is good enough to continue using, it is good enough to re-issue to other staff

I have to question the original post saying Ark saved money by going cloud. From what I've seen, they saved money by consolidating systems. Surely that saving would've come if it had been done in a cloudy way OR an onsite way? I mean, we've saved a huge amount of money in our Trust by consolidating systems. But it isn't cloud. Instead of each school having a server, we have a single cluster at our central site hosting everything and P2P ethernet connections connecting all the schools back here. Will save us £30k every 5 years in hardware alone. We have a single (well, except one school but that will change at some point), wireless system - so 1 controller, 1 thing to manage etc... We have a single domain, etc... I'm not sold on cloud tech being a money saver yet to be honest.

As someone who has done similar, I can't believe they all cost more. We had quotes from 4 other providers, and the only product more expensive than SIMS was iSAMS. ALL others were significantly cheaper.

We offer 2 options to our finance staff - dual 24" monitors, or a single 27 monitor. We get about half and half with what they choose. We go with AOC I2790VQ or I2490VXQ now. Plus a desk mount to vesa mount them and give plenty of desk space.

They're clues to cars. A couple of really obvious ones, but I don't know enough cars to name more than 2 lol

There should be a bunch of them - there's more than 1 in the world.

Possibly? I can't remember if I did now...

Can I ask why it must be laser? There are more cost effective inkjets now, like the HP Pagewide devices. Cost a lot less in inks too.

These devices will be going home with children - so no internal storage. We'll keep spares to swap out for damaged ones, which we'll then repair if we can. We're looking at the flip style ones - multi-purpose. I didn't even realise Lenovo make them, so hadn't considered them at all! The HP x360 11 I've got as a demo worries me a little - the plastic lid seems to have an easy way to unclip the screen from it by forcing the little lip which you use to open the device upwards. Not ideal. Dell and Acer are organising me demos of their brand new models (though the Acer is a pre-production unit I believe).

We are looking at moving to Chromebooks across our Trust over the next few years, on a 1:1 basis, so I am investigating devices. I'm getting demo devices from HP, Dell, Acer and Asus. Has anyone gone down this road and has some caveats, pointers, advice etc?

We have done the same... But it isn't "due to GDPR guidelines", its because allowing USB sticks, and complying with the rules is complex and higher risk than simply blocking their use. We basically just don't want people to use them because they're more hassle than they're worth. Easier to get people to use OneDrive and RDP.

Yup, definitely. We've extended the lives of our 3rd gen i5s with SSDs - added at least 2 years to their lives.

Fairly chunky machine for me - i7-7700, 16GB RAM, 250GB and 1TB SSDs. 3 x 24" monitors connected to an Nvidia Quadro P400.

We've got SSDs in about 90% of our machines now. We've had 2 fail in about 8 years. Never been an issue for us. We've had SSDs in our servers for 2 generations - so going back a good 7 years now. Never had one fail in the servers. Got 20 of them in servers at the moment, they've not skipped a beat.

Concert

We use Veeam to back up to NAS, then Cloudberry to back up that to Azure. The NAS presents as an SMB share, yes.

Like it or not, subscriptions are the way everything is going. Software, hardware, food, you name it, there's subscriptions for it. I suspect it'll all start as "all you can eat" packages, but eventually we'll start seeing Sky or Virgin type "choose the packages you actually want" subscriptions instead. So I can select strategy, simulators, etc... But leave out sports, racing games etc... Streaming games are inevitable. I get 7ms ping for google.com here, which is basically nothing, even in highly competitive games.

Deduplication opimisation runs nightly, rather than in an active way.

We don't have the staff for that sadly. CPD is managed by someone else in the Trust also.

If performance only suffers via VPN, then the VPN is the only possible culprit. Meaning you have only a couple of options - 1. move to RDS or 2. Redesign your inter-site connectivity.

Performance? Pretty much "average to poor" all the time. We only have the accounting client installed on the servers and on an RDS server, which all the finance staff use. No VPN in use at all.