kestrel1

A bit behind the times here as well, still using pen & paper. To move the staf into the twentieth century would be hard, but to get them into the twenty first would be near impossible. The wheel, What is that???

We use Citrix with our 150 thin clients, this will refresh every so often when not in use, but comes straight back to the login screen. I know Citrix is expensive, but I have found it to be very reliable. Our network support company recommend a maximum of 40 clients per server, we currently have 4 application servers, so are just within the limits. I also have various PC's that connect using the Citrix client software, so if all machines connected, we may have problems, but I have rarely had any major issues with too many clients connected. I don't expect you could pursued them to start using Citrix could you?

What age are the kids that will use them? It was suggested that we had some laptops available in one of our main school IT rooms. I pointed out that the keyboards probably wouldn't last five minutes with the heavy handed 11 - 16 year old's & I also told them that it would cause even more work for myself (I am the only one, looking after a network of around 200 machines), they agreed not to try the laptop route. We have a trolley of laptops for use in the Sixth Form, not had too much trouble apart from the batteries dying, which is a major pain. We all know about battery memory, but I just can't seem to get through their heads that they need to let the batteries discharge fully every so often, so they are put on charge after a hours use. Still it ain't my money. So the battery life is another aspect that you could throw at them. The cheaper the laptop the lower the quality of the battery (not always the case I know) I know what you mean about getting on & just doing the job that you have been asked to do though.

You will be lucky to get anything for that price with XP Pro installed. If you could look at second user, you may be luckier. Are these machines to be housed in a trolley? If so is that included in your budget? I think you head is be very tight. I am afraid they see these deals on the TV or in a paper & think that the machines are suitable for school use. This really annoys me, they should leave it up to us to give them a price then they can decide what they can afford. Luckily I do have most of the say in what we get. Anyway, with this budget you need loads of luck to find 15 laptops with XP Pro.

I never use the pads if I can help it. Horrible things. Much more control with a normal mouse. But I did have problems with cheaper USB mice, until I switched to the Logitech.

I had a similar problem with mice on Lenovo 3000 laptops, but found that a different make of mouse sorted it out. What make of mice did you use originally? I found Logitech mice better.

I think we have had all of these & more. Do they think we are stupid. I know a lot of teachers fall for it. I've had the old corrupt floppy & often have got the files back by using scandisk only to find no course work. Funny ain't it. Blank CD's or USB drives are the favourite now.

Instead of installing XP you could try ReactOS: http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html This is free open source software & is claimed to be a replacement for Win XP. The download is only about 24mb. Worth a try, better than using pirate software. You could always have a look at Linux as well. Various versions available for download: http://www.linux.org/dist/list.html

I presume it has screw holes in each corner where it is screwed onto the heat sink? I have got one that is 50mm square & 15mm deep & has the normal 3 pin mini plug on the end. Made by CoolMaster.

I will have to have a look at what I have about tomorrow. I have got some kicking about somewhere, that may fit the bill. If you measure across the width of the fan, that would give us an idea of size.

What size do you need? What CPU is it for? Strange that it would break half the blades, It wasn't still spinning surely?

Different situation here, but similar with regard the noise. Our server room/IT office hosts our servers & was always very hot. I eventually convinced them that we needed air con, as I could hear the fans on the servers before I entered the building, if it hadn't been done the servers would have died. The poor IBM rack servers had got so hot that the fans stayed on full speed permanantly. Once the air con was installed the noise reduction was amazing. We used to have a hotswap dual PSU on our file server, but when this died & we got a new server, we didn't worry about it. It could have been a mistake, but we have had no problems so far. Are you sure that changing the case would solve the problem. Often CPU fans can make a lot of noise if they get dirty or the fan is failing, the same goes for system fans & these can be replaced fairly cheaply.

We don't use the schools agreement here, we buy licences as required. The only thing we have to pay out for each year is our subscription advantage for Citrix, normally around £2,500 & server support contract.

oops, missed that one. Trying to move away from MS as much as possible these days. There will still be some licences required obviously, so maybe I will take a look at Insight.

Yes they are nice prices, where did you get them from? Last time I saw prices like that, the lorry had just turned the corner. lol

Yes samba should be able to get you onto the resources of your domain. It may already be built in to Ubuntu, but may be a samba client. Check under networking or something similar for a samba client. You may get an error, as Win2k3 has something disabled (can't think what it is at present) If you have the smb protocol built in to your browser you could type smb:// Followed by the server & resource. I got this to work, but not had the time to get on to my Linux box recently, so may have forgotten some steps.

Oh, forgot to mention. I am now losing the will to live, if you know what I mean. lol

Just a quick question. How many people are working in your departments i.e. NM, tech's etc. & how many machines are being looked after? I only ask, because I am the only one here looking after the whole schools network with about an 1100 user base, 130 thin clients (could be more by now), 8 servers, probably 60 or more PC's, most teaching staff with laptops + some support staff. More stuff coming in, more networking being added next year with about 60 more thin clients & 30 or more PC's. I keep pushing for help, but nothing happens. Salary is real bad as well for a Network Manager.

No you need to tell the DHCP server not to use those IP addresses that are static, because if those machines are not on their IP address could be allocated to another machine via DHCP. You just need to set the static IP's as reserved.

What internal IP range do you want to use? How many machines are connected to your network? You many find it easier to set your current machines to use DHCP, except for machines that really should stick with a static IP i.e. the print server.

By the look of it Multimon taskbar is free. Don't know what it would be like, but you can find it here: http://www.mediachance.com/free/multimon.htm Scroll about 3/4 of the way down the page for the download link.

Best of luck with your future. I am not a religious person, but I believe we have no right to say to anyone who is, that they are right or wrong. Lets face it who really knows. If it is right for you, then who has the right to say other wise. Everyone is free to make their own choice in this life. I would take my hat off to you, if I wore one. Good luck.

Yes but if the drivers are not present, it wouldn't necessarily work.

Are the motherboards the same? Is it just the BIOS that is at a different version? It could be that the mobo has been changed, therefore the ghost image aint going to like it. You really need to make sure that all hardware is the same before proceeding.

Even though they are the same model, do they contain the exact same hardware? Dell may have changed something, maybe the graphics card. May be worth checking.