tmcd35

What wireless access points are you using? Are they managed or unmanaged?

We've got 14 of these here, lower spec, and have had no problems. Indeed so far good reports from teachers who love them. We've got quiet a bit of VeryPC kit here and so far very few problems. The odd issue we have had as been sorted professionally and quickly. In terms of the problem, it sounds suspiciously power related. Have you checked the power connection is fully home? Tried running the machines without batteries? Also, when you sent one off to VeryPC did you send the power brick as well or just the laptop? Ours took their time arriving as well. I think it's a supply and demand problem - very popular and over subscribed.

A bit old, but would this from Google Images work:

I thought the Exams module and System Manager 6 was both still based on ancient code.

When will Capita update the 16bit modules to 32bit?

VHD images mostly. I suppose for user files a encrypted 7zip archive split into suitable volumes would work, I wouldn't want to just dump 4Tb of user files on there totally unencrypted. Not sure I trust the cloud that much.

Just checked and our domain has unlimited storage. Alas looks like maximum file size is 1Tb which puts a dampener on using it for off site backups.

It's a viscous circle. If they can't recover the costs of making the game they go out of business. If they go out of business, no more new games - or at least we get used to a world were AAA gaming dies out and we return to the 16bit era of 2.5D platformers and shooters being offered by indie devs. I know this is Square Enix, so may as well take with a pinch of salt given their known development practices, and it's an old story, they since turned it around but... Square-Enix reports $61 million loss as console game sales sag | Digital Trends When you can't turn a profit of selling 3million copies of a game at £40 each (guessed average), somethings got to be wrong. I'd be interested in finding out how many people actually played both games vs how many bought them. I got them both through PS+ so they cost me nothing but I'm sure Sony paid Square Enix a nice wadge for them. If more people bought the game new instead of secondhand would the average game price be lower? Would they be selling closer to, say, 10 million copies, had the second hand sales been new sales would they have turned a profit on these games? With stories like this it's understandable why publishers want to try and tap in to that market and recover some of their costs. As I said before, it's not like they have the multiple revenue streams of the movie or record industries.

Again, you're not taking in to account man hours. By far the biggest cost, more expensive than costly cartridges vs. cheap blu-ray, is labour. 16bit games had teams of around 10-20 people. Assassins Creed has a credits sequence longer than any Hollywood movie I've ever seen. Assuming the same £40-50 for a AAA title in 1992 and now, then taking inflation into account, we are paying less now for more work! IMHO, the solution to the DLC problem is simple - support more indie developers.

@rich_tech, what you're not taking in to account is the changes in wages over that time. Adjusting the purchase prices for inflation gives some idea (admittedly not exact, or ideal) of how big a purchase the console would have been at the time. If £350 today is a "Serious Purchase", £299 in 1995 would have been a "Very Serious Purchase", and game prices too. Spending £30-40 in 1995 money on a game is not like spending £30-40 today on a game. I remember asking my parents for an Amiga for Christmas in 1989. At £399 it didn't sound like a lot of money. But now I'm earning my own money and am in a far better financial system than my parents ever were I can understand why they never did. If someone asked me to spend £935 (in todays money) on a Christmas present I'd bulk at that too. Hell I'm pretty sure I can't afford to drop nearly a grand on anything without considering it to be an "Extremely Serious Purchase". For what you are paying for console prices are very fair and reasonable IMHO. Same too for most AAA games. If you look at the man hours involved in creating games like Assassins Creed and the Arkham series, then compare them to Holywood movies, it's a wonder they don't cost a darn sight more. I suppose a certain amount of DLC is to be expected when you've sank 4 years and a couple of hundred developers into a project that is hard to retail too much above £50 a copy. It's not as if they have the multiple revenue streams of movies (cinema, pay per view, streaming, blu-ray, etc).

Er, I think it's the pronunciation of Bucket (pronounced: Bouquet) that's important

Not got the figures here, but I did a bit of a study out of curiosity looking at UK launch prices of consoles and adjusting for inflation. The PS4 at £350 is one of the cheapest consoles ever launched! The PS1 launched at £299 which in todays money would be £519, ouch.

Not wanting to give any spoilers - I thought they went in completely the wrong direction on the identity of missy, very disappointed.

I only play single player. I don't mind DLC as a rule, but then I only purchase additional stories/missions that extend the life of the core gameplay. I can't be done with all this purchasing additional costumes or weaponry carp. So far, all the games I've been interested in have resolved themselves within the purchase price without the need of any DLC and the DLC has been pretty much just that, an extra story tagged on to the end. Possibly the only exception was Catwoman in Arkham City, but even then the game is fully playable without needing the Catwoman content, admittedly that was a bit near the mark for hacking slices of a game to create DLC/extra editions.

Bump, Closing date this Friday.

No, but I was expecting a PC based around the 16bit version of the CPU in the Spectrum: Zilog Z800 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Kind of disappointed now, Would have loved me some of that CP/M. Maybe could have got a token ring internet connection going and everything

Microsoft Excel. I tend to use it in place of a notepad, word processor, desktop publisher. It has to be the most versatile and most powerful bit of software on the planet. You can makes some cracking flat file databases, a bit of work could probably make them relational. Using cell formula alone it's possible to write games with it, it is a pretty powerful programming language in it's own right before you even touch VBA. I even use it for network diagrams in place of something like Viso. Amazing bit of software. (I'd still prefer to be playing The Last of Us though )

Unless you VLAN it down in to smaller chunks, teachers will have to find their whiteboard among a list of 70! A good sensible teacher pc naming strategy might be required. Also, make sure students don't have any access to any apple device or software on the same network. We had some instances when we first installed AirServer were random music would start playing out of teachers computers. Turns out pupils in music were connecting up through iTunes. I think you can password it down but that then becomes something else for teachers to moans about.

I know Server 2012 is supposed to behave nicely as a DC in a VM environment. Haven't looked at it myself and am a little old school on this matter. I have a physical DC and two virtual. If I thought one of the DC's would be off for long enough to cause replication errors, I'd flatten it and build a new DC. DCPromo doesn't take that long on a new server. Might have to adjust some DNS setting in DHCP but I'd rather do that than deal with an AD with replication issues. As far as DC's are concerned I don't think there's a problem unless all three disappear then I suppose it's a bear metal recovery of the window system back up.

So far, only tested Hyper-V Replica on 1 unimportant server to see how it functions. Until I did that I was thinking of getting a full blown iSCSI SAN! Replica continually monitors the live running VM and sychronises the changes with another VM host. The synch is not 100% live, more within x number of minutes depending on how much as changed and needs copying, and how many machines are set to replicate. The second host is set up to store the copied VHD in a different location to the first, in my case it will be a second storage server, and has a replica VM waiting to be switched on. It won't let you switch on the replicated VM unless the primary VM is turned off either by failure or forced failover. This means I can survive a storage server failing or a host sever failing and at a flip of a switch can get everything working again through the replication system. It's not an instant failover solution, from what I can see (unless I missed a setting), you seem to have to manually turn the VM's on after failover. Also, there is the possibility of some data loss if replication hasn't occurred in say 5 minutes or so. Either way it's better than nothing and gives us the level of security, continuity and failover we require. The cost of going iSCSI and CSV seems to prohibitive and frankly a little more complex to set up for what little gains instant failover would give us. Also with a SAN solution it's be more work working out a mirroring system to allow for storage failover. Here I'll have both storage and host failover through a system that is pretty close to identical to what we are running at the moment - straight SMB shares.

Personally, I'd go Hyper-V every time. MS have bought it up to a level of parity with the paid for version of VMWare that means it does almost everything you could want in a VM environment. For me the inclusion of Cluster Shared Volumes, Windows Storage Pools, and Hyper-V Replica at no additional cost is what finally won me over. Back in the Server 2008R2 days I missed ESX but Microsoft have pulled the product so far forward over the past couple of releases it's getting harder to make a good business case to spend thousands on VMWare to achieve the same thing. Lets face it you've pretty much got to buy the DataCenter licences anyway, once you've done that for 2012R2 you've got everything you need software wise. About the only thing I can see is missing is proper centralised VM management. Haven't looked at the cost of buying into SCVVM yet, but I'm sure it'll work out less than buying all the VMWare equivalents. But then I haven't found the need for that level of VM management. The standard Hyper-V Manager MMC plugin seems to have all the functionality I need on a day to day basis.

I'd look at the Dell VRTX with 2 server blades and a couple of terabytes of storage. Couple of copies of Windows Server 2012R2 DataCenter and then virtualise the whole lot into 16 VM's, including the DC's.

I doubt the TV will have the software or drivers to run one of those. Something like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/TeckNet%C2%AE-Multi-function-Wireless-Repeater-Ethernet/dp/B00E95C2BC/ref=sr_1_10?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1414050682&sr=1-10&keywords=access+point Is probably closer to what you are after. Or maybe: DrayTek Vigor AP-900 Simultaneous Dual-Band Wireless Access Point with PoE & 4 Gigabit ports: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories (you should be able to find similar/cheaper, was just doing a quick search). The other option could be ethernet over mains: http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-PA411KIT-Powerline-Adapter-Starter/dp/B0084Y9N3O/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1414051096&sr=1-1&keywords=homeplug

I'll be in the gents and may not come out for...awhile

Seeing this (IT porn!) made me think of one reason why you might want to have your storage separate from your host servers. Depending on how many and the type of VM's you are planning on running you're likely to need a number of processor cores and RAM for them. (our top spec'd host is 24 cores and 128Gb RAM). It may be easier spec'ing host servers in 1U racks to suit and then have a couple of these monsters for storage, than try to spec out servers like this HP with a lot of cores and a lot of RAM.