iSteve

Please don't buy moving heads, particularly on a budget to do your front light. It's likely that the beam angle on them will be too narrow to sufficiently do your front wash. Again, it's unlikely they will have framing shutters so you will have spill on to your proscenium, no focus or frost, and if the colour wheel doesn't have colour correction everyone will look very cold from the discharge lamp (forgive me, I've just read some of this further up, so it's repetition). Cheap low end disco movers will also be loud. Used ETC Source 4 profiles are high quality and reasonably priced and will give you a more natural, controllable light for front light. Of course, if your school is minted and we are talking about using Martin TW1, or VL1000s, go for it! For front light you want some good profiles, or fresnels with barndoors. Have a look here Used Lighting & Ex-Hire Stage Lighting Equipment Sales | usedlighting.co.uk under Conventional Fixtures. Most schools will find the Strand Quartet or CCT Minuette range suitable. I've used this company for work and out of school purchases. There's nothing really to go wrong in a 2nd hand fresnel, so it makes financial sense. Dimming wise, Zero 88 Chillis are good reliable dimmers, available as hard wired. Or on the used route, Strand ACT6 or anything by Pulsar is rock solid. You will need a structural engineer to assess the load bearing of your roof. DO NOT just hang stuff off girders and hope for the best. Your LX bars (which you will also need - else where is your power and data coming from?) will need load testing and certification. If this lighting system is to be of any real use (eg school plays) you need a good basic desk, either memory or 2 preset. Do not buy disco junk for this. If you do go for moving heads, you need a desk capable of LTP/HTP moving light control. CPC LED PARs at £40 will be washed out by an overcast day. These sort of things are designed for eye-candy at discos. They aren't designed for 'proper' lighting. Usually the dimming curve on them is horrendous. The beam angle will be tight, and you won't be able to mix a good enough white for basic work. LED suitable for 'proper' lighting will cost more than several 2nd hand convensionals. Whatever you do, make sure you budget enough for that odd extension cable you might need, replacement lamps, tapes etc. There is a lot to think about here, and a risk of money being wasted if it's not thought about properly by experienced people.

Thanks. I found that before. Seems our board is different to the one mentioned in the post. I will see if I can contact their support.

We are using the board pen ActivPen3-1. In what way does the slate pen differ? I assumed they were the same as we have never had any other pens with our slates while they were in storage. Incase it matters, the pen does operate the small LCD on the corner of the slate, but this might just be pressure sensitive?

Hello, I'm trying to resurrect our Promethean IWBs as we now have some staff who are keen on using them as more than just a projector screen. We have PRM-AB2-01 boards. Recently I have found a batch of ActivSlates, which seem to work - PRM-RS-01. Doing some research online, I read that the slates can talk directly to the boards, but in our case with our AB2-01 boards, we needed an ActivHub. We now have a hub to test with (PRM-AH2-01) but I cannot get the slate to talk to anything! The computer can see the hub. The hub is running the latest firmware, and the computer is running the latest version of the driver. The Hardware tab can see the board when connected over USB. When I plug in the hub it will list the hub, then wireless board, wireless slate etc. Thinking that the board may be wireless I tried to 'register wireless board'. This doesn't seem to talk. If I plug the board back in over USB, and try to register a wireless slate, the register button is greyed out. Using an older version of the driver, if I try to register the slate it will tell me a PIN to tap in to the slate, but my keystrokes/tappings do not do anything and the computer remains on the register screen. Can anyone help? Do I have the wrong combination of hardware?

This is fairly well documented on here if you search. In basic terms (as you haven't told us which OS you are running): In Server Admin, set the server to be "Connected to a Directory System". Join your AD domain. You then promote your server to be an Open Directory Master to provide directory / MCX info to your Mac clients. On the client, you open Directory Utility, bind to your Active Directory domain, then enter the the path to your Open Directory Master in the search path, but do not bind. In the Search Path setting, your AD server will need to be first in line to allow authentication, with your OD Master second. Under the settings for AD you probably want to uncheck "Create local home on startup volume" if you want you users to have a network home directory (roaming profile). If your home directory server is Windows based (ie, not HFS+ format), iPhoto will not work....random info there. This will allow you to authenticate against your AD, mount a home folder, and get preferences to lock down your Macs. I appreciate my response is very vague, but if you can come back with some specifics we can help you out further.

Hold up folks. The OP hasn't provided any further information apart from "it's slow", and we've all launched in to "run all maintenance tools you can get your hands on" mode. Let's get some details: -Which Mac laptop do you have? (if this is an iBook G3, it will always be slow from modern standards) -Is the hard disc near full? -Is the laptop slow all the time, from turning it on, or is it only after you open a specific piece of software?

Thanks for your replies. It's completely right to separate the running of the IT from the ICT subject. ICT are just another user at the end of the day. I will have to try hard to talk management in to this view!

I have not come across 2Simple so I will make a very generalised stab in the dark that if it is pitched at year 2 students, we're not talking multi track / multi channel audio software with huge files and so on, so would probably work fine over network based home folders. Remove Desktop is great, very capable software.

Hello! We have a long established member of staff who is retiring at the end of the academic year. They have worked in an ICT capacity at our school for 30+ years, so have seen it move from a novelty / hobby subject, right up to seeing it embedded in the curriculum in the present day. However their style of management has been far from ideal. After such a long period in post, the school is considering a re-shuffle in the ICT staff structure. What I wanted to do was canvas your views on the structure of ICT staff in your schools to find out what works and what doesn't. For example: -Does your school have an ICT manager / Network Manager / ICT Coordinator? -Do they report to SMT (senior management team) or are they part of the SMT? -Is your 'Head of ICT' responsible for leadership of whole school IT, as well as the subject? -Does your Head of ICT lead any technicians you may have? -Do you have an ICT manager / Network Manager / ICT Coordinator who is responsible for whole school IT systems / planning and infrastructure? If so does your Head of ICT only concern themselves with ICT, the subject? I'm trying to identify where the "lines" are between teaching staff and technical staff and the roles each takes, and at which level (be it teacher, technician, manager or senior staff). At present we have a "Director of eLearning", a non technical post filled by a teacher, who sees himself in charge of the Network Manger, all technicians, all ICT teaching staff, and who tries to direct whole school activities. They control all school IT budgets from exercise books to technical items asked for by the Network Manager who has no budget of their own. They are not a member of the management team. There is no "Head of ICT", just this Director. This sort of dictator approach is what the school is trying to remove. Your thoughts on the topic are very welcome.

I would try the site in a different browser such as Firefox to narrow down the problem.

We have successfully managed a 10.7 client from a 10.6.8 server. We added it in to WGM, and it "just worked".

You haven't said what software you will be using. For example, we have had classes of 30 kids using GarageBand straight on to network home directories and it works fine. Though if your music people will be using huge files you will be better saving, or working from the local HDD then copying or exporting final projects back. To clarify an earlier point - iPhoto will only work with Mac OS Extended (HFS+) file systems, so if your students home folders are on a SMB share iPhoto won't like it. (Re: price, we have found Apple kit reasonable when comparing against very similar hardware and factoring in the bundled software. Their remote control and server software is also very very cheap against the Windows counterparts). One final pedant - it's Mac. Short for Macintosh. MAC suggests an acronym

Thanks guys. We picked these machines up FoC and most are fine. At least I know that others have had issues - and now I can stop trying to troubleshoot machines that inconsistent faults!

The cases are date stamped 2005.

I will have a look! I think these are around the same age as a bunch of Macs we had which had capacitor problems.

Hello, We have a load of Dell Optiplex GX280 machines (P4 3.2GHz, 2GB of DDR-667 RAM, 120GB SATA hard drive). Recently a few of these have started to blue screen with inconsistent reasons. Today one died with win32.sys as a problem, then 10 mins after that 'memory management'. On one machine we have systematically replaced the HDD / RAM, re-imaged etc but it was still unreliable. Does anyone here have experience of using Win 7 Pro on these machines? Do you find it reliable? As much as we know these aren't modern computers, most are not up for replacement yet, so we can't throw them out and get i7 workstations (or i3 for that matter). Thanks!

We have been running a 70/30 Mac/Windows split on our site since 2004. Initially we ran our staff 'network' using OSX Server, which at the time was 10.3. This authenticated 70 Windows machines, provided SMB shares for home folders and some machine management using registry / NT4 policy style 'hacks'. The major problem we had was that at that time Open Directory would trash itself every few weeks which we simply couldn't accept. After many refinements of our network we provide all user accounts/authentication and GPO through Active Directory on Server 2008. And manage about 350 Mac OS machines via a Mac Mini. All home folders are hosted over 4 XServe and XServe RAIDs. The servers in this role have been very stable and licensing and management of the Mac OS based machines has been very cheap. We pick our server hardware and software on what we deem best to do the job. We have a variety of systems - from Server 2003R2 to 2008, Mac OS 10.6 Server, Debain / Ubuntu Linux. Anyway, I would be wary of putting your directory system in Open Directory. It may have matured, but AD has always been way more stable for us.

You may need to make a folder that is RW (chmod 777) for all users on Macintosh HD. We do this for iMovie use on the local machine.

Our staff log in to their laptop, we then set their user account to be a local admin so they can add home printers. They have a proxy .pac file to they can access the internet at home. Offline files is set up so they can work on files at home. Our staff wouldn't be able to cope with two accounts. Nor would they understand the difference!

No, still no luck.

On ours we have "iMac" and "VGA Display" when we mirror. If you up the resolution on the VGA Display, the iMac will match it or similar. If you up the iMac, this usually doesn't up the VGA Display resolution. What I'm trying to say is change your external resolution first. Under mirroring situations, you can't run two different resolutions.

Are you saying you have 250 desktop machines, all syncing home folders....over wireless, or is the WPA2 issue completely separate? Why are your desktop iMacs syncing, why not use network home folders (AKA roaming profiles)?

Our users install Office themselves from a download link that they register to get via MS. There's no giving out of school license keys.

May be worth deleting the computer account from your AD if for some reason that is preventing it from rejoining the domain.

Hello, We have a couple of users here who are trying to print on to Avery labels with Word 2010 and are experiencing problems when they print, mainly that the label on screen is perfect, but when printed is misaligned on the physical print out. The users are selecting the correct label template based on the model of label sheet they are using, the printer and page setup are set to print to A4. As far as I can see there is no scaling or other resizing options set, but time after time the labels print misaligned. Does anyone know of a resolution, or is bad label printing a 'feature' of Word 2010?