kaphc

Am at a different school and have 4 x laptops running Windows 7 Home Premium. The school has an EES and has asked me to upgrade them to Windows 7 Professional. No problem, I thought, downloaded the upgrade from the Volume Licensing Centre, copied it to disk and ran it. And discovered Windows Anytime Upgrade! So Windows 7 won't let me run the upgrade disc and EES won't give me a license key for the Windows Anytime Upgrade. How do I get round this? Do I have to do a fresh install of Windows 7?

Thanks for the Maplins link, it looks pretty good! Not sure about splicing cables but I'll take a look at what else is out there. This may be a daft question but is the wattage of a sound system indicative of its power and therefore the volume it will produce? (So does higher wattage = louder sound system?)

That looks like the sort of thing the head had in mind. As you say it depends on the power .. seems to be no way of telling whether it'd be enough without trialling it first. I'd be interested to see if anyone else uses something similar and whether it's any good.

Been asked by the head to have a look at portable PA systems for using outdoors at sports day / school fair etc - it's a primary school so not going to be a massive site to cover. Wireless is ideal from a H&S viewpoint, so needs to be something rechargeable and with a 2 - 3 hour battery life. We'd need a speaker and a microphone and looking at a budget of £200 - £300. Anyone got any recommendations?

On the PCs where it didn't work when logged in as a pupil, it did when when logged in with Adminstrator rights. Have looked at this further and it appears that the hard drives of the PCs all have shares set up on them, but they have not all been set up in the same way with the same rights! That explains the disparity from PC to PC which was puzzling me anyway. One machine has been sorted, and just going round and doing the others too! Thanks for the useful comments and pointers.

Yeah I did wonder about group policies, cos it's a new site to me, and I haven't had chance to go through all the policies set up by my predecessor yet. Only thing is, all the machines are in the ICT suite, so apply the same group policy and I'm logging in with the same user account so I can't figure out why it would work on some but not others. It must be something to do with access to the C:\drive though. I'm off-site from there until next week now but will take a look then.

Have been asked by the headteacher to get Starspell 2001 working on Windows XP. It's installed on all the PCs in in the ICT Suite already, but curiously some of them work fine (albeit asking for a CD-Rom) whereas others come up with an "Error 3051 cannot find file c:\starspell\users\users.mdb". I'm logging onto all the PCs with the same generic "pupil" login and the users definitely have access to the users.mdb file, so I can't understand why this message is being thrown up. Being such an old version, there's no support available from the manufacturer really now, so just wondering if anyone had come across this in situ and knew of any solutions?

I've seen the revised pricing from Kcom for two of my primaries this morning. They have gone UP by £2,000 from the "illustration". As this is a public forum, I won't vent about this :-) but just putting out feelers to see if anyone else is in the same position and what you're going to do? We've been planning and budgeting to a certain figure, and to have £2,000 (at least) added to it at this stage is causing us to have to change the project plans quite a bit!

From: Capita **Latest emPSN Promotions** Reduced data migration charges and buy now, pay no annual charges until 1st November 2012. Just flagging this up in case anyone hasn't seen it and wants to get revised pricing.

We have the same annoyance with the timeout setting on the embc portal but are hoping that this will change when we move over to the new provision later this year. Plus hopefully being able to have more control on whitelisting and blacklisting sites.

Yep, getting the teachers onboard is key. In one of my primaries there is no ICT suite - instead there's three banks of netbooks (which is brill when there's only 5 classes!). But all the issues have come about with teachers not having the time to get the netbooks out and put them away .... so it gets delegated to TAs or the kids. This leads to netbooks getting mixed between trolleys, not plugged back into charged, cables getting damaged etc. We've even lost one netbook despite me being able to provide the date and time it was last used and the pupil who logged into it. Actually, that's another point - depending on how your network is currently set up, it would be useful for all pupils to have their own individual logins. It certainly helps to track things down faster rather than if you have generic "class" logins.

Incidentally in the latest embc bulletin / newsletter, it says "schools are encouraged to place their orders by the end of June 2012" [from the empsn/embc framework] so that fits in well.

This is a really good question .... and at the moment it seems that it's because the headteachers don't want to have to think about this issue and are therefore delaying (or in one case ignoring!) it. And also because the price from kcom may change so it's hard to know what the best deal is! But yes, there's some food for thought on that one, especially as two of the schools that I work at are on the same exchange.

Had a call from kcom at one of my primary schools asking about their quote today. Apparently they were wanting all schools to make an expression of interest by the 30th April - not sure where that date's come from!?! Anyway, it got my thinking .... the primary schools I work in are all waiting to see what other schools are doing and it seems like no one wants to be the first to make a decision. Is anyone willing to nail their colours to the mast in terms of what connectivity and what software services they are going for?

It's an Intel WiFi Link 5100 AGN. There was an option on the device settings to "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" which was enabled, so I disabled that but the connection still dropped. I've upgraded the drivers from 12.1.2.1 to 14.3.1.1 and sat there for 10 minutes afterwards and the connection didn't drop at all so that might have done the trick, especially as it upgraded through a couple of versions. I've asked the teacher to keep an eye on it and let me know, but am only in that school once a week so will have to wait till next week now to find out.

Can I just clarify - is that for a physical alarm / sensor system rather than anything to do with the wireless network. Can't see anything in the room but will have a look.

Yeah when the signal drops, the laptop loses the network connection completely and has to be rebooted. There are two other wireless PCs running off the same AP without any problems (though in a different place in the room) and I've tried another laptop in the same place and that drops slightly from 54 to 48 Mbps occasionally but it doesn't drop off the network. Starting to think it's the laptop, might look at the wireless card drivers first I think.

Just looking at a problem a teacher is having with the wireless network connection on her laptop (running XP). I've seen it go from Excellent 54mbps down to very low 5.5Mbps and back again to Excellent in the space of 5 minutes. Switching the laptop's wireless connection off and on again also takes it from very low back to Excellent but apparently she's tried this before as well and it doesn't always work. The AP it's connecting to is a Netgear WG302 which is up on the wall about 3 metres away and about 2.5 mtrs off the ground. There's clear line of sight apart from a washing line with some paper hung across it. Can't see that this would affect it would it? I'm just about to order a new battery for this laptop anyway, so don't want to if there's a problem with the laptop. Any ideas why the wireless connection might be so intermittent?

Hi PyROm My understanding in Derbyshire is that you can get the connection you need from Kcom (or whoever) without any obligation to take any of the applications or services on top. The only think I would check is whether you need any DNS services to get your web traffic and emails directed. I know DCC is pretty pushed but trying to keep in touch with all the Derbyshire schools, I've got his direct line phone number if you need it and want to PM me.

And Symantec came to my rescue and showed the kid who last logged in. Wasn't at work Tues/Weds so have "named and shamed" today and will see how the teachers respond. Someone's going to be turning their classroom upside down today I think.

Oh bugger. Bought my kids DSis for Christmas from Game which is going to mess up the warranty presumably if anything happens to them now. At least I've spent my GAME points (on a pre-owned Ben 10 Wii Game lol!).

The internet filtering won't be a goer, we're on the embc services and should in theory have access to the Netsweeper filtering but in practice primaries don't seem to get much access. We're on Symantec Endpoint Protection and that's rolled out via a central management tool so I'll have a look and see tomorrow. Good idea.

Have trawled through the attributes Tab and could only find the last login time and stamp ... no user name. Googling it has brought up various ways of implementing scripts etc for the future if we want to do that, but otherwise has drawn a blank. It just seems to be something that AD doesn't record, unless I've missed it. Otherwise, yeah, maybe it has been filched. Still think it's a teacher in a hurry who's put it somewhere and lost it though. Hope so anyway.

Well, have trawled through Event Viewer for the logons between the two time stamps on the netbook object and there's nothing coming up linking it with a user sadly.

One of our netbooks has gone AWOL, and despite urging all the teachers to have a look for it in their classrooms (and standing there to make sure they do!) it ain't turning up. I would love to be able to find out who last logged into it as this would show up which class to look in. I've tried AD Users & Computers and found the last login event was the 8th March - doesn't say who though. Is there any way to find out a username?