mb2k01

It might be worth checking with SWGfL if there are any routing issues affecting you... (I've sent you a PM with results of a tracert)

If your site is unavailable too I'd guess the problem lays with the ISA servers. Would be worth concentrating efforts on them to confirm they're not the issue. (I'm not much help on those though!)

Kev, Have you checked your protolcols have all started? Have a look in your Services (control panel etc) and check the normal ones are running etc. PM me if you like - I'm quite local to you (another school in neghboring county) I could give you a ring / work through some things if you like?

I've only ever ordered projector bulbs from them myself but never had a problem - always fast delivery and rock bottom prices (other companies might undercut just to get the sale, but by the time you've actually gone to them and waited for them to come back you've spent more than the £2.40 difference in man hours!) As I said, I've used the projector side of them (used to trade as TSI-Europe... maybe still do?!), but I know our Finance Officer also ordered consumables (paper, pens etc) from them sometimes too - never heard him complain. Cheers

I inherrited a Dell server at a job before and had nothing short of a nightmare to get support. Foolishly a couple of years down the line I thought i'd give them another chance as they give me a really strong price when I was out getting quotes. They were great on pre-sales, but anything after-sale including support was like pulling teeth! I've had a limited amount of desktops and the horrible latitudes that our LA decided to dish out on Laptops for Teachers scheme. All awful! Maybe they operate different support teams and it just happens we've had different kit! Maybe that's the secret! HP - I've had countless amounts of desktop, notebook, switches (currently even arranging demo kit of procurve managed wireless) and had no issues with them at all! The worst thing I can say is that speech is an issue - I have a northen english accent which seems to translate badly in the Netherlands (or wherever they do their support!) - but their online support is amazing. I went on the other day as one of HDD's failed, logged it, sent it off and had one sat on my desk in a day or two.

Completely disagree. In fact, couldn't possibly disagree more! Dell are shockingly awful to get hold of via the phone, and have next to no support or care for their customers. Not caring about general consumers is one thing (although bad enough), but education/corporate customers who spend tens of thousands of pounds with them.... they are quite possibly THE worst company I've ever used (slightly behind Mesh Computers!) HP can be equally challenging to get hold of on the phone, BUT... their online support is second to none. Go to the website, fill in the details, get email confirmation and have a spare part out the next day. Lifetime warranty on some of their larger kit (our ProCurve switches etc), backed up by decent support when needed too. Not sure what else anyone would want them to do! (BTW, I don't work for them, or have a commission lined up for this write up!)

How many disks are you looking for it to hold / do at once? You can get reasonably cheap ones up to about 12 disk i think... I was looking at about 100disk a while back and I think they came out about £1,500-2k!

You must have a really small budget! I am sure I saw a disk laying around in an old box the other day - I'll have a look over lunch and if no one else has replied I'll iso it for ya!

I'd still bank on it being permissions. Whoever wrote this Promiser software needs a tazer session (thought shooting might be a bit much!) We, reluctantly, now have to resort to logging on with local administrative rights, have manual mapped drives to the share, and check for the latest flash update each time we run an exam session - it is litterally the ONLY way we can be confident that exams are going to be satisfactorily run. The punch line of it all - there's no way I'm leaving a local admin account open with non-IT Support people on it - so every Promiser exam session now has a very over-paid highly technical invigilator!

@FN-GM - The BIOS is the most cut down version of BIOS you'd ever be likely to see! I went in hoping to at least see SATA mentioned somewhere in there, or IDE emulation - anything lol. Not a sausage! The closest you can get to SATA configuration is changing the boot order (lol that sounds stupid but I mean it litterally!) @kmount - Thanks for that. I'll check the software out. At this point I have to agree - certainly not wasting more time on a repair tomorrow. Efforts will be concentrated in data retrieval and this can be the last Acer notebook I touch for a while!

It's not very often I post things where I am completely and utterly stuck... so I'm hoping someone takes pitty on me and saves my sanity... I have an Acer Extensa 5610 laptop (which sods law, belongs to a Headteacher!). It arrived to be with XP installed and stuck in a blue screen circle of death (turns on, asks whether you want to start Windows XP normally or via safe mode, last known good etc etc). Goes to XP splash screen, gives you a quick flash of a blue screen and restarts. Now the problem. The Head wants his data taken off it and as it's a standalone laptop doesn't have a backup! Not a problem you'd think... wrong! Attempt 1 - Copy the data to my desktop machine - The Extensa HDD is SATA, so plugged it directly in to my desktop and found two drive letters appeared. Drive G was a 50GB FAT32 partition with one folder + temp file. Drive H was a RAW volume with no properties, no files, crashing if trying to do too much. Result - Can't copy (or see) Windows Directory or My Docs etc! Attempt 2 - Re-install Windows over the top (hoping it would stick the old docs in a windows.old folder!) - Get as far as pressing enter to install Windows and it says can't find the Hard Drive. Assume this is a SATA driver issue. Attempt 3 - Re-isntall Windows + use "F6 floppy" tool with SATA drivers Same result as attempt two! I've actually done nothing else today! I've sat in an office at well over 30 degrees, air con not installed until next week(!) and aren't any further forward to having it fixed than I was at 8.40 this morning!! Anyone have any ideas (apart from the obvioius throw against a wall / give up!) I don't care what happens to the laptop - I'll buy him a new one out of my budget quite hapily, but he'll still want his data! Cheers PS - Out of warranty, Acer support less than helpful - told me to make a slipstream CD which I actually ended up doing and that didn't work either!

Sounds like a great film - Might wait for the directors cut to come out on DVD though!

I'd guess its meant for a SIM with a 3G internet connection - so either your standard phone SIM that does allow 3G or the SIM out of a broadband dongle! (If you put your phone one in make sure you have unlimited data - I don't want to get sent the bill for data charges! )

The OP said they were sending emails to mailing lists, so I assumed this was Exchanged based (or at least Outlook client based!). I'm curious about you advising relay access be used though. Surely that isn't best practice? Allowing relay communication might be useful but it leaves a huge possibility for misuse / unauthenticated use of an Exchange server?

I'm quite an open-minded guy. I remain neutral on most subjects and listen to both sides of a discussion before forming my own opinion.... but..... WHY is YouTube such a massive issue to teachers who can't access it? Yes, it IS a resource which has useful content - but it is not the ONLY resource out there! The fact is that YouTube has unacceptable content on it - in the form of viewer comments and suggested videos which are risque. WHY should countless amounts of time be spent trying to argue for this resource to be available if the flip side is it would be subjecting pupils to inappropriate content!? At my places of work, YouTube is filtered by RM SafetyNet Plus. I occasionally provide access to YouTube on an individual basis (for large scale science experiements too dangerous for school etc), but go no further than that. Smoothwall is an option we may go down in the future - but I have to say - the ONLY reason we would need to look at an internal proxy is to support the repetative requests for access to this innapropriate website to cover up for inadequate teaching preperation and/or creativity. (Extra disclaimer: All above and any further replies on this topic = My own personal opinion. Not that of my employers - nor the official line taken by the people / teams I manage!)

What version of Exchange are you running? Do you have any gateway or mail scanning software that could be doing int? Probably the silliest question you'll get asked today... but you are sure these 15 addresses are correct aren't you? Could you post (or PM me) a copy of the bounced back email + the headers? I'll see if I can track something down if I get a minute this afternoon!

I had similar issues a while back and found it to be down to the newer versions of Adobe Reader (in fact it is a known issue with them - a problem displaying some PDF's inside of Internet Explorer - can't remember the specifics). Basically I got around it by deploying version 8 for a while. Since then I have reverted to setting links up with the Force Download box ticket - it's much easier and the user gets a larger view of the document.

There will probably countless asterix's at the bottom of the advert! Must be a new subscriber, have phone line and broadband through them etc etc. If they coordinate discounts on HD in the same way they do Sky+ then it might well be a worth a call to the cancellations department - tell them you are considering cancelling your Sky Subscription and going with Freeview HD as you have a HD TV and in the long run will be saving money. Ask if they have any better deals for you. I did this with Sky+ when the best deal around at the time was free installation and £149/£99 for box. Got the whole lot for free! Obviously, if you actually aren't wanting to your Sky contract don't push them too hard - just tell them you'll take time to reconsider and get back to them!

Hi Brian, Yes please - that would be great! PM me if you like

Would DHCP not be suitable for this scenario though - as guest devices would more than likely have external local IP settings and not pick up DHCP broadcasts?

Hi All, I've had a good search around but can't seem to find the answer (apologies if I happen to have missed a previous post though) I'm wondering if there is a way that I could set our network to automatically assign proxy details to new wireless devices? My thinking behind this is a previous evaluation of Smoothwall (which is technically ongoing when I get time!), and an evaluation of Rukus. Essentially, I'd like to be able to walk in to the site as a trusted visitor, detect a wireless network, get guest access and connect, but then have the proxy settings already assigned to the user? We currently have an external proxy server in use. Although I can do most of the above scenario through Rukus, I can't automatically distribute proxy settings - A user would need to enter these themselves or have access to a script to do it. Does anyone know the answer to my question or have a better way of doing things? Cheers

If email was handled internally by Exchange then it would be as easy as it could ever be - click and open! (Unless the user isn't configured yet - so they would have a 3-click wizard which would auto configure their details from AD/Exchange). Apart from the ease of use factor there is the cost. If you are going to install Exchange internally it will be the same licensing cost regardless of how you use it (technically not correct if you license correctly and do external etc). So to have that cost and presumably have to pay the provider of your external POP3 addresses doesn't make sense to me. If it's all being driven from management I dare say they don't actually really know what they're telling you to do! If it were me I'd go back to them and ask for more info on what they're trying to achieve and say you might be able to work it out cheaper or provide an alternative with more benefits

Completely out of curiosity, do you know why they're wanting this? If they've decided to stick with external pop3 email why go for internal Exchange? Seems kind of like having a bike, buying a car and continuing to ride the bike!

If it was me i'd do one of the following (in order of preference): Deploy Office 2007 everywhere Ask the finance manager to save to a different format Utilise a different program for TIFF display. Tiff could be imported in to a range of other apps if this particular one is being difficult

Lol it's ok. Are they wanting general psychological assessments or specific checks like dyslexia etc? I'm not at my main site today, but will grab the name of some titles for you later today / next week - I'm sure we use something like that.