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Maybe I misunderstood the Smart Advantage pricing (maybe one of our sponsor resellars can clarify?). But I took the version of Smart Notebook that can be sold with non Smart products to be a stop gap for the three years and then the over priced non-Smart Advantage licencing kicked in. If I'm wrong then, well, bonus - the choice of boards has just widened significantly!

You do, but the price difference between for Smart products and for other products is, er, frightening. Or at least the quote I got to include our three Promethean boards had it that way.

This: SMART Technologies Unveils New Value Line of Interactive Flat Panel Displays for Education -- CALGARY, Jan. 15, 2015 suggests the edu rrp is just under £1500, so mileage will vary between resellers. However it's Smart, and their new annual subscription model is unforgiving on non branded product. Given a good 7-10 year minimum expected lifespan on one of these, the cost of smart Software after year 3 should be taken in to account.

Just saw the edu RRP for the Smart 4055 55" board, might be the 4000 series might be the way to go if you're invested in Smart (as we are) since ongoing licencing costs would be significantly cheaper (affordable).

I'm a good boy, I'm a good boy! I can put a square block in a square hole.

I've been watching Jim Sterlings excellent coverage on YouTube. Either the Russian Mafia have found a new money making scheme and/or a bunch of 14 year olds are deluded in thinking Unity lesson tutorials make for releasable games. There are far too many good quality legit games in existence to waste money on half backed ideas that'll go mysteriously quiet once the money stops racking in.

I've literally just started. First impressions and all that. Just got out the fire cave at the beginning and changed my uniform, that's where I've left it for tonight. Just doesn't have the instant wow factor of Midgar at the start of FF7. As for the Junction system - WTF? FF7's combat/magic system was nuanced enough for me. Am I playing a video game or editing a spreadsheet? I'll try and follow your advice (if I can make sense of it, and the game), thanks!

My first thought was rouge registry entries, but this: Where does Vista/Windows 7 store Wireless Connection Information? - Super User, suggests wifi is no longer stored in the registry. Take a look in this path: c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Wlansvc\Profiles\Interfaces\ and see if there are any old entries to be deleted.

Pretty much the same. :shock: I use Excel for everything I can think of - including formatting e-mails (joking). It's the most flexible and useful program, especially for formatting. A lot of jobs I could use Word or Notepad for are just easier in Excel.

I can totally relate to this. Although we have roof cavities instead of basements...

There's something about the history of the place and it's home to the parliamentary system used around the world. It's been the seat of government since 1512, though the current structure only dates to 1834. It feels wrong moving parliament wholesale to another location permanently. I say kick em out and fix it up in one go. Perhaps look at some parliamentary restructure and some new satellite sites, perhaps in the regions, to help elevate the strain on the old building. Or, put a UK parliament in Manchester and make the palace home to a smaller English parliament.

Last game I completed? Flashback - The Quest For Identity. The 2013(?) remake of the 1992(?) Amiga classic. Just started Final Fantasy VIII on the PS1. I'm not sure I'll make it to the end. I didn't complete FF7 when I played that recently and so far that was a better game.

We've had one Clevertouch installed and are now planning to migrate all our classrooms over to these over the next xx years. About the same price as a SmartBoard + Projector, better resolutions, clearer display, better calibration, brighter, easier to set up/install. No contest really IMHO.

Oh, I am. I should really get round to backing it. I backed their first film, which was fascinating. I think I complained about the rush over the Amiga years in that film at the time - now we know why!

That site comes up with about 40Gb per month for me. Seems a little low. Edit: scrap that, another play with the sliders says 130Gb per month, that seem more realistic!

Is there a place on the VM website that'll give me this info? Can't find it. I do a lot of streaming, in fact all my TV content is streamed now - YouTube, Netflex, iPlayer. Some downloading on and off when the mood takes but mostly wait for whatever it is to appear on Netflex.

Alas, I feel the same way about the Miggy. If I had one I'm afraid you'd struggle to prise it from my cold dying hands. I've been thinking about this general subject a lot recently, at least in terms of video games. I'm really in to retro gaming and have been thinking of starting a proper collection, I already have a number of systems in the attic. However, looking at inflated fleabay prices for this sort of stuff I am beginning to wonder if we're just playing an expensive game of russian roulette. Who will be left holding the computer/console/cartridge/floppy/tape when it finally lucks out and joins the great retro library in the sky? I've decided, piracy and morality be damned! Emulation is the only true way forward.

Ah, there might be some confusion here. I went through this when I took hold of our domain. You don't need to transfer the domain to a new registrar. Your school owns the domain and Nominet have it pre-registered to you. All you need to do is update Nominet with the IP addresses of the DNS servers hosting the authoritative records. We ended up setting our own DNS server up because I lost the will to live trying to explain the distinction to third parties (our LA included). Do an whois lookup of your domain here :http://www.nominet.org.uk/whois - it should come back with your schools address and listed as the Registrant.

We have our .sch.uk domain on Nominet pointing to our own local DNS servers we've set up specifically in our DMZ to host it. If GoDaddy are happy to host the domain then all you need to do is point Nominet at their DNS servers.

We're in the market for a couple of 55" digital signage screens. I'm guessing these are 'out of our price range'

That's it! I'm finally going to get hold of the old Fu Manchu films and rewatch then in honour of a fine actor!

I tend to agree that CPU advances have been slow and end users tend not to need them at any rate. I'm seeing a lot of documents open - so web pages, powerpoint, word, etc. Not seeing anything that'll stress a CPU, certainly not single core or cache heavy applications. Based on this a Quad Pentium or a Dual i3 with HT are plenty, and I doubt you'd see a lot between them. Tends to be the SSD for real speed boosts, and the RAM. Turns out that Win7 and 2Gb is not a lot of fun. 4Gb is perfectly fine right now. 8Gb should be good for the next 5 years. It's not that individual apps don't support multi-threading - they generally don't need to. It's that users tend to have 5 or 6 apps open at once now, and so giving the OS options to manage those threads across multiple cores seems to make more sense to me. I'm actually starting to worry about HDD capacity again, long term, more than CPU performance. Now we've moved from HDD to SSD, drive capacity as shrunk from 500Gb-1Tb to 60Gb-120Gb. Is 120Gb enough space for apps long term? Are 240Gb SSD affordable? Probably the big question for next years spec?

I budget £450 all in and get the best deal under that I can for 'this years spec', which is pretty much as you put there. Rather than specify Core i3, I just say 'Quad Core' and see what I get. i3 with HT is fine. But then a Quad Core Celeron is plenty fast enough for 95% of our users. Interestingly the core price/spec for laptops has been the same as desktops for a few years now. I think you need to spec with half and eye to the future, 5 years is a long time, and the machines I bought 5 years ago really are starting to show their age (dual core AMD with 2Gb Ram). Windows 10 and Office 2016 are on the horizon and HTML5 is all but here. Multi-threading is more important to me than the latest greatest, fastest processor. I'd take a Quad Celeron over a Dual i3 any day. Strange sentence that, a couple of years a go I wouldn't have touch low end Pentium or Celeron with barge poll!

Yes, only ever work with ex-VAT figures.

Decide your budget first and look at specs from there. My current gold standard is: £450 inc. monitor. Quad Core, 8Gb, SSD, AiO, Hard Glass Screen, and at least 3yr warranty. And that's very achievable. Always get at least 3 quotes. I tend to ask VeryPC, Novatech, and Stone - and bash them for price until one of them breaks.