tmcd35

I'll go for a top 5... 5) YouRock Guitar, MIDI adapter and Rock Band 3 - Play "real guitar" on a games console? Count me in! 4) MiniDisc player - 25 MD's full of music mixes in Long Play (the original iPod) 3) Amiga 600 - just before Commodore went bust (then upgraded to an A1200) 2) iPod 20Gb then later 80Gb (I love my music!) 1) iPhone (okay, still got, use, current - but it's the single best bit of tech I've ever owned!)

The laptops I've had from VeryPC have been amongst the best I've had - better than the Toshiba's or Lenovo's I've had in the past. Yes they're rebadges, but they are Clevo's - one of the biggest laptop manufacturers in the world. I'm sure I've had Acer's in the past that were rebadged Clevo's.

Group Policy Prefences?

Aah, so this is what my Business Manager means by "opportune costs". Given the CEO's pay, is installing Windows really the best use of his time? Don't they have techs for that?

Here's El Reg's version of the story (I read yesterday): SkyMapper turns up oldest star ever found Think it was a TV program I tried watching on the subject once, most likely Horizon, they tried to explain that the Big Bang didn't happen in one location at specific point in space-time. Rather it happened everywhere all at the same time?!? Needless to say my head exploded and my neck's experienced a pleasent breeze ever since (thank's to Weird Al for the imagery).

You can clean install the original Windows 7 so long as you have the original OEM/restore disks and a Windows 7 CoA on the case.

You could set the SSD up as a cache to speed up regularly accessed applications/games... software rec - How can I use my small SSD as a cache for a larger hard disk? - Super User

It's usually a question of speed, capacity and resilience - pick 2. RAID10 will give you speed and resilience, RAID5 will give you capacity and resilience, RAID0 will give you speed and capacity. Take your pick. RAID10, you've got 1.2Tb space RAID5, you've got 2.1Tb space RAID6 is new and not always supported by all controllers. If it is then you get more resilence and less speed. Horses for courses. The question is more what are you using the drives for than which RAID is best. Example, we have a 16x450Gb SAS storage array. I opted for RAID50 with 2 hot spares. Gives me the best ratios of speed, capacity and resilience in that particular set up. RAID10 would absolutely kill my available disk space, which wouldn't be acceptable on that server.

Currently we're 99.9% Windows 7 (I'm sure there's still 1 or 2 XP machines hiding in corners). About to start a ground up review of ICT use. I can see Windows 8.1/9 being a possibility on laptops over the next 2-3 years and the use of desktops with Windows 7 will probably decline over that time. Not sure if/where Android/IOS/Chrome fit into the wider picture and may in turn question how much we move to newer versions of Windows.

Currently we use a transparent proxy with our smoothwall set as the networks default gateway. Devices connecting this way are put on our most restrictive filtering settings. May change this when we start looking at 1:1 devices, BYOD and managed WiFi.

Treesize Pro? https://www.jam-software.com/treesize/

I'd be interested in seeing some real figures comparing benefits claims to both National Minimum Wage and The Living Wage. Can/do the unemployed recieve more or less than either of those figures? What effect does Tax credits have on those earning the NMW, does/can it take them over the Living Wage?

Worth doing your sums on EES vs Academic Select licenses. EES is worth while if you plan to roughly keep pace with new versions of Windows/Office as it's an annual subscription and you loose entitlement to the software if you stop paying the subscription. Over 3 years that £1600 becomes £4800, or £8000 over 5 years. It could be, depending on what you need, traditional Academic licences work out cheaper and are your's to keep forever. (disclaimer - we are an EES subscriber because it doe's work out a better deal for us).

Sorry to breath life into a thread that quietly slipped away, but saw this on the Beeb this morning and it seemed relevant... BBC News - Living Wage is answer to pay squeeze, says Archbishop John Sentamu

Are you hosting any services locally - webserver, VPN access, e-mail, sort of thing? If so have a look at "EFM" (Ethernet First Mile). It's the replacement to SDSL connections. Speeds upto about 40mbps in both directions are available, and at a fraction of the cost of a full on Fibre line. We're having one put in for out failover here.

For me, the questsion of ESXi vs. Hyper-V depends largely on if you currently run Windows Server and what you future upgrade plans are. Licensing wise, You'll pretty much want a copy of Windows Server DataCenter in order to run multiple VM's, at which point you have Hyper-V included free in the pacakge. Add to that Hyper-V in 2012 supports replication (and I think failover) without the need for shared storage... From what I remember ESX is the better product, but costs to get all the equivalent features. If you're looking at central management with something like SCVMM for Hyper-V then ESX will become a contender again as the vSphere Management Center cost about the same price (I think) and gives ESX many of the missing features from the free version.

Technically, yes, it works the same way as SoftXpand. The computer automatically logs in with a master admin account and extend a single display accross however many monitors you have attached. MPS then "chops up" the display into individual "virtual displays" that the keyboards and mice are then mapped to. It works with your graphics drivers, so if they allow multiple monitors on one DVI (which I believe is part of the DVI standard) then it should be fine with MPS. It usually helps if everything for one display is running off the same USB hub, including the monitor but this is not essential. The only problem I've ever really had with MPS is USB mappings and I think that's more to do with how the motherboard chipset manages the connected ports (but I've not extensively tested this).

If we know they are coming back we just disable the account. Otherwise, we disable the account and move it to a leavers folder until such time as we can be bothered to delete it completely (a year or two later). This way when they return nothing needs recreating, just enabling.

Not a bad suggestion. What are the contents of the other partition? If you stuck a second drive into the server can you Robocopy the contents to a new drive, freeing up the space after the C partition and then allowing you to expand?

No, but I did!

I know that a number of EduGeek'ers are fans of QI

I thought the exact same thing. The sea has been erroding the coast quiet badly in that area for years, how come they weren't washed away at any other point in the past 800,000 years? And how did they date the foot prints? Beeb suggests they didn't have a lot of time before the sea reclaimed them.

The reason you can't is because the unallocated space is not continuous with the C: drive, it's split after the D: partition. If you delete D (I'm guessing you don't want to do that) then you'll be able to expand the partition in either the GUI or with diskpart. Not sure if some clever partitioning tools (or a Linux boot disc) could move the D: partition to the end of the drive so the available space is in the right place.

The only complaint I have is with the Google Active Directory Sync program. It works, after a fashion. My main gripe is that it's a manual process. Sooner have a timed service. Maybe there's some command line options/settings I've not explored? Also, got the password sync going, but it also seems - iffy. Not sure all password changes are being correctly communicated with google. This is a fully automated service though, which is good, and the vast majority of passwords appear to be applying without issue. Did have to upate our AD password rules to match Googles password policies though.

Lol - I'll search almost anything on the internet right now. Both techs phoned in sick, left on my own and only 1 password change request all morning.