t_h

I have to laugh. They've been banding that term about since the 70's and so far it hasn't happened so for the HT to add it to your "to-do" list is just pure comedy.

I was under the impression they were phished rather than hacked but I've changed mine as a precaution anyway.

Agree with the above to be honest. As you only have a small amount of users you would probably get away with one machine running both domain controller and file server roles. If you have the money for a server and a NAS then you'll have a much better setup than you have currently. Many NAS devices have the option to back up to USB which means you won't be flooding the network and it will be much more convenient for yourself. The prospect of losing up to a weeks worth of work alone should be enough to justify spending a few hundred quid to improve the setup.

Justified the expense then in my opinion.

Did you install the driver as local administrator or domain administrator? As strange as it sounds, I've had HP printer drivers bum out like this and the fix was to install them as local admin. Stupid, I know, but worth a try. HP make good hardware but their software drives me up the wall.

We run ours fine on a pretty standard Core 2 HP workstation with 2GB RAM. Those cheap ProLiants would be more than capable. Personally I would add another GB of RAM and another HD in RAID1 to those ProLiant boxes and you'd have a nice little server. Question is, how much do you want another box to look after and create a backup routine for? At least with it being hosted at the moment it is one less thing for you to worry about. I'm trying to get servers out of my office, not in!

Cheers for those, I've bookmarked them as no doubt I shall be returning to them in the future.

Is it a network printer or a local printer?

That is pretty funny actually. I think more PCs should come with alternative on-switches. Maybe some sparks as you throw down the lever.

Pretty much this really. I think I'll be using it myself in future as I don't really have a problem with malware but always use AV. It will save me 20 quid or whatever each year so it's all good news for me.

My wireless router and NAS box pretty much cover everything I need on the home network. For testing I prefer to use virtual machines.

If he can find the drivers for all the hardware we have to support and write the ones that are missing then fine. Joking aside it's all well and good writing these blog articles (this one isn't even that good, it's littered with inaccuracies and half-truths) but in the real world it just isn't that simple. What about the catalogue of Windows curriculum software we've collected over the years? What about flaky wifi drivers for teachers laptops? For every reason to totally move to open source software I could probably think of two not to. I don't wish to sound defeatist and I'm not saying it's right to be locked into Microsoft software, but you've just got to play the hand you're dealt. I've absolutely no issue with using Linux to run a file server for example. We also use open source software (VLC, TuxPaint, Audacity, Moodle etc.) where appropriate. Deploying Linux throughout, in my opinion, is not appropriate for my school.

I'm not sure what planet the last IT guy was on - if the technician's computer was configured to share it's hard drive with other computers then -- news flash -- it's a server. Anyway, SIMS being hosted externally is good and one less thing for you to worry about. As for a server the first thing to ask is what are the client machines using? If they are XP Pro then you are fine, but if they are running home versions of Windows then you will have to upgrade them in order to join the domain. This is obviously an additional cost you need to consider. If you have the budget for it then I've just bought a quad core HP Proliant for £199 + vat which would make a nice little server for a small school that you could add additional hard drives to. If you are really stuck budget-wise, then have a scout about for any old hardware that is still working. If you can cobble together a working PC with plenty of hard disk space and a decent network adapter then you could install Linux and use it as a file server. At least it will free up your PC so you don't have to keep rebooting. I don't envy your situation as it seems you are meeting some resistance to improve the network. What do they do for printing? Do they all have local printers?

Shocking. For large purchases, we generally require at least 2 quotes before it gets signed off.

I agree with much of the above. You seem to be covered technically so as with any other job you need to set yourself apart from the other candidates. Do a bit of background reading on the school. Visit the website, read the Ofsted reports etc. Part of the job description I applied for mentioned improving the school website, so I took along some mock ups of what I could do and they were quite impressed by this - not necessarily by the material I brought in but by the fact it demonstrated enthusiasm and background preparation. And yes, personality counts. To be a good all-round tech you definitely need good people skills so I'd bring to their attention any customer-facing experience from your time in retail. Good luck with it.

I know you prefer a free solution, but I thought I'd mention this anyway. I work at an SEN primary and we use a product called "Mouser" from SEMERC which is basically a PS/2 device that sits between the mouse and the PC with buttons on that enable you to turn right and left click on or off which is much better than an "all or nothing solution" and is easy for staff to use as well. http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/7469/mouser.jpg Unfortunately they seem to have discontinued the line which is a shame because they are one of the most popular devices in school. It would be worth sending an email explaining your issue to the people at Inclusive Technology and see if they have a solution.

I've tried a similar thing over the last 12 months, and the following has been my experience. Please note that this is purely anecdotal and I'm not here to slag off Linux or any operating system for that matter. I decided, quite randomly and for a challenge, to see if I could use Linux as my primary OS so when the time came to format the computer I held back installing Vista and went with Ubuntu 9.04. For the first 24 hours it was fine... then the system froze and the problems began. After many hours of re-downloading the .isos and checking the hashes, trying 32/64bit/KDE/Gnome/XFCE versions and many hours on Google I came to the conclusion that 9.04 was just not going to work for me. I knew my hardware was fine - I'd been running it for a couple of years previously and it never skipped a beat. Anyhow I was determined not to be beaten at the first hurdle (even though I've not seen instability like that since Windows Me) so I decided to go with one of the LTS releases and installed 8.04. This ran fine and I quite happily used it for 6 months. Then the Windows 7 beta arrived and I decided to try that out - at this point it brought into focus quite a few things that had been bugging me subconsciously about Ubuntu. Firstly, MS Office is just better than Open Office. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of OO and use it on all platforms, but it's just not as good. Some people might say it's slow and I should use abiword or something for a word processor, but speed wasn't an issue for me it was functionality and efficiency. Secondly I realized I was forgiving far more of Ubuntu than I would normally of a Windows system. Firefox would continuously forget font settings and sizes, Flash player was just bad (admittedly a third party problem, but a problem nonetheless), my wireless adapter (checked beforehand for compatibility with Linux) would just refuse to work after waking from sleep (I had to disable and re-enable the driver every time I woke up the PC), sometimes waking from sleep or hibernate would just not work and require a hard reset, occasionally the audio drivers would bum-out for no apparent reason, Rhythmbox had the most horrendous memory leak I've ever seen... etc. etc. Suffice to say Windows 7 has remained on that system and, to coin a phrase, it "just works". Determined not to throw in the towel, I decided to continue my Linux experiment on my works laptop (a Lenovo N200). Ubuntu just flat out refused to install on it (it just dropped me into a shell I can't recall the name of.) So I tried Linux Mint 7 (based on 9.04) which, to my surprise, installed and worked quite well. It didn't detect and install my card reader which was annoying but hey at least it was up and running. I've painted a pretty bleak picture of Linux so far, but I'm happy to say I did have some positives with Linux Mint 7. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it interacted with the Server 2003 network. File shares worked first time and I nearly fell off my chair when it automatically installed a driver for the network printer (which takes 15 minutes to do on Windows XP!) - I thought that was very impressive. Unfortunately it wasn't without it's niggles - the most frustrating one was a bug with the "graphical sudo" prompt which required a reboot (this happened far too often.) I kept this set up for a while but the time came when I needed to rejoin the domain for various reasons and I've found myself booting into XP more and more often. I currently dual boot my work laptop but I think when I start testing Windows 7 on myself Mint 7 will bite the dust. So, that is my experience with Linux so far. Even in the light of the headaches it has given me I still quite like it. For a server (file, proxy) or firewall I would choose it in a heartbeat. The compiz effects are amazing. To be fair in general I think Linux is quite amazing, things like the sheer choice of filesystems and how quickly new protocols are adopted. It really is a credit to the community. But would I recommend it to friends and family? No, perhaps with the exception of "Grandma" who will literally only browse the Internet and word process. For me the desktop and day-to-day experience is not there yet. Yes, I know a lot of problems are with third party companies and I sympathise with the fact that some manufacturers throw a binary blob in your general direction and never give the community the chance to fix an issue, but you have to suck it up and face the fact that some things just do not work not matter what the reasons behind it are. That said, I will definitely be back in a couple of years time to try again. I'm looking forward to seeing what Google bring to the table. And I've just realised this post has turned into an essay - I must have needed to get it off my chest!

I thought it was good, but it didn't live up to my expectations. I'm nitpicking a bit but the "documentary" style camerawork didn't do it for me. It was fine in the beginning when he was speaking to the camera and the crew were obviously following him around, but as the film progressed the style continued where it was obviously no longer in that context. Also the aliens were far, far too "human" for my liking - using human gestures and responding to body language that has taken us many years to evolve. Obviously these are continuity decisions and issues important to creating good characters that we can relate to, but it didn't feel quite right to me. The social commentary too was a nice theme but nothing groundbreaking or anything to rave about. It was fairly pedestrian as far as social insight goes. All in all it was worth seeing, perhaps worth seeing again but if you miss it at the cinema I'd say rent rather than buy the DVD. It certainly entertained me but didn't blow me away. 7/10

You need to deny the account they log in with local administrator rights. Are the laptops joined to a domain? and are you using Windows XP?

I've used Antec and Tagan in the past, both have been fine. Only PSUs to give me problems are the billy no-names. Stick to the branded PSUs and you'll not go far wrong.

Just through past experience really. I run a Q6600 and an 8800GT on a 380w PSU (with 2GB RAM, 1 optical drive and 2 hard drives) so a good quality 400w PSU will be fine. I've even overclocked this in the past and run it at full tilt for months on end so I know it's stable. Those calculators are alright, but try a few and get an average. I tend to go to the manufacturers site and see what wattage they give for each component and then do some sums and factor in a bit of breathing space.

I have a very similar Antec case to the one listed and it's not too bad actually for the price but I wouldn't want to go any cheaper. What I would do is go for a 400w PSU and use the money saved to buy an E7400 Core 2 Duo. I definitely would not go for a Core i7 920 because they are more than double the price of the E7400 plus you'd need to spend around double on your motherboard as well. If Flight Simulator is the hardest you're going to push the computer then the following will be fine: E7400 2.8Ghz C2D 2GB RAM (4GB if you can afford it) Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L Motherboard GeForce9400GT NSK-4000II Case 400w PSU 1TB Hard drive Optical drive Operating system wise I would stay away from XP if you are buying new. It's like going out to buy Office 2003. If there isn't a compelling reason to use XP then I would recommend going with Vista/Windows 7. Oh, and dual booting two operating systems won't impact performance beyond using more disk space. If you are planning to run one in a VM then definitely go for 4GB RAM.

I would definitely go for more RAM. 2Gb at least. Also, what operating system?

I'd try to find out in detail what these "security concerns" are and then take it from there. It really doesn't make sense when you have 150 XP boxes anyway to exclude Windows Server.

The most unusual thing I pulled out the back of the cupboard was an old laptop complete with giant Energizer battery. It looked like a 9V battery on steroids! Never seen anything like it. Shame I never found anything genuinely interesting.