gwendes

Just looking into licenses for the 'trial' version of WinRAR we have installed on most of our machines. It's looking at costing us around £1500 - can anyone suggest an alternative suitable for the kids to extract files only?

Just wondering what percentage of IT staff work all year to term time... Does it depend on the area, school or whether it's secondary or primary? Any stories from the quiet time?

As with most things, unfortunately, sensible, logical, intelligent people are in the minority... I do agree that they are shiny and would happily buy Mac hardware (it's all te same generic x86 crap) - install XP and freak out any fanboys that come near my useful computer. Have Apple seen Peep Show? I understand that being an unemployed, drug-taking, failed musician is 'cool' - but surely these people have no money? I'd rather be David Mitchell any day

Thirded. Bad idea. A gigabit on the same wired network might be ok. Get the desktops you'll appreciate the extra power.

Apple are just good at making people angry... it's the lies I can't stand

I can't trust a company that genuinely think that PC is a brand. Even less a computer company - Apple really grates on me... compare yourself to a VAIO or Alienware if you dare - generic beige boxes can't fight back

10Mbit - tends to be fairly quick even at busy times. It's always satisfying to be downloading at 1MBps!

10Mbit - tends to be fairly quick even at busy times. It's always satisfying to be downloading at 1MBps!

I suppose they did it to be helpful really- not many schools are decked out with DVD drives in every room. You'll probably end up with a decent layer of DVDs and CDs anyway. I've got an XP everywhere I look!

I'd be steering well clear from CD swapping anyway - make and image and then let ghost work it's magic! Can the CDs be converted into a DVD? Has anyone else found that integral software has problems?

I've passed it over to my colleague and now she'll never have to manually create an address list again -

thanks very much

Sorry I can't find anywhere to copy or download that database- help!

Probably - this is the first place I've asked as I got a chance this morning. I'll have a look...

...for a colleague that has been writing them out manually for some time! I will be creating this myself if no one has one - can't bear to see people doing things the long way!

I used to work for Novatech and now work for the City Of Portsmouth Girls' School. Gary is one of the account managers but if you setup an account you might use one of a few - please don't all call Gary! The school use Novatech as the main supplier of PCs and having worked for them I can say only good things about their technical support and returns policy. It is always easy to get hold of a real person on a real telephone number. Live Chat and technical support forum is availble on their website - forum.novatech.co.uk They are based in Portchester and Bristol - if you're local it's an extra reason to setup an account. Anyone from Novatech reading? Hi!

Our laptops also have to be connected to the domain so I tell teachers not to connect to the internet at home. Still end up rejoining the occassional mistake... Too much hassle - tell them not to.

I used PC Inspector and have 'recovered' over 4Gb of lost files. They are all in clusters of 1472Kb - Does anyone know how to restore the actual files from these?

It was just some restore files from the manufacturer. Has anyone got any suggestions for some free recovery software? I ran PC Inspector File Recovery on the suggestion from a colleague but don't know how to restore the recovered clusters into files. The drive is reported as healthy - I think something from Limewire has messed with her assignments The other strange thing that I noticed - she knows nothing about it - it a network drive called Hotmail on 'NetDrive' X:

I jsut ran gparted linux and was able to remove a 'hidden' flag o the drive. Not holding out too much hope that her data is there anymore - think it's a Packard Bell restore image

Hi everyone, A student teacher has asked me to recover what I can from her laptop. After a day of running various utils on it I noticed that the drive wsa a lot smaller than actually printed on the drive. Disk Management recognises TWO drives so I'm guessing her data is on the other. The drive does not have a letter assigned and show with FAT32 Healthy (Unknown Partition) . Anyone know a simple way to allocate a drive letter. Right - click only gives the option to delete the partition... Thanks!

I'm just making an image which will have the very latest drivers installed. Hopefully. *prays to the great spaghetti monster in the sky*

Pre-logon is definately on and wireless power is set to the highest. Hopefully today we will get round to reimaging all the laptops and this will lay the blame firmly on software but I'm at the point now where sending them to the 'Will it blend?' guy on YouTube would be by far the best option!

I would be looking at changing the cards if they had originally been fitted with these Intel 2200BG but they were fitted with cards I was having issues with and the problems remain so I am trying to find the next step. This morning we have been looking through the switch setup and found two things that we're trying. The first is Pre-authentication and we've recalibrated the access points. My fingers are hurting from crossing them...

Aruba AP 61 access points - 5 in this building. Usually 4 are visible from each room. The wireless cards have all just been upgraded from generic Ralink cards to Intel 2200BG in an attempt to solve this issue.