jamesfed

Care to justify? We have a VPN for our staff powered by Forefront TMG - nice stable and secure all staff do is double click on a shortcut on their desktop and boom its like they never left the school. Bearing in mind we issue a notebook PC to every member of teaching staff. Currently looking at the updated Direct Access feature of Server 2012 - wasn't possible for us to implement it with 2008 R2 but 2012 is looking extremely promising

Going ok for my personal account but we were having some problems with Live@Edu during the day......

Might want to turn on Disable external branding of Internet Explorer (GPO under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer) - with the GPO set to disabled it can muck up a whooole load of things in IE of all versions.

£150 from our LEA for the whole site (350 PCs) per year..... Looking at using Microsoft Forefront Endpoint but in all honisty it would probably cost me more in time to get it running and deployed than it would be to stick with Sophos.

I wouldn't bother - the card is 6 years old (Comparison of AMD graphics processing units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and if you don't play many games then just stick with the onboard graphics. Putting this card in will only chew through power without reason. If uve got the AGP version it won't even fit in anyway....

Lan3 did our Aerohive install as well FYI on the students front you can set things up with WPA2-Enterprise/a RADIUS server (like Windows Server NPS) to get it so that students can login to the Wireless using just their Active Directory Username/Password.

Q1 - Yep it works on pretty much anything with a modern web browser - possible to have people getting documents on their phones/tabets as well

Bottom of page does not render correctly (IE9) I'd have your newsletters link go to a page with previous newsletters as well How comes your forum takes ages to load? On the contact us page contact details should be text not images - this allows people to copy/paste into Outlook/ect. Also it look like your whole site is based upon static HTML - have you considered using a content management system like WordPress? The layout you have there could be knocked together in a few minutes using Artister - Artisteer - web design software and joomla template maker

No overprovisioning on the drive (at least no more than the standard for the card) - if you boot into the cards bios/firmware you can enable a extended life mode which cuts down on your useable space but I don't see much of a need for it at this stage.

Yep not booting direct off the drive - we do however have plenty of VMs booting off that drive which in theory would put more strain on the drive than a single RDS server. @VeryPC_Ed - quite right about there being no TRIM under Windows 7 however over 9 months in now and 0 reallocated flash blocks...think that speaks for its self that the need for TRIM might be disappearing (at least in the relatively low usage environments you will find in a school (compared to a corp datacentre)).

Sounds about right although I haven't tried a boot from the PCI card before so you are on your own with that one Just in case anyone is wondering about life time in a server please do the maths on the hours on and how many months that represents with 0 flash blocks reallocated - Thats running our Lync, Exchange, UAG and RDS Load Balancer server

If only I could've built the RDS servers out of HP SL series cookie sheets - would be even cooler than blades HP all the way for me all the same!

Bearing in mind that the parts I used in the custom RDS farm were all desktop parts the 4 'servers' came in at just under £1,300 + licencing and that happily runs 30 sessions for me (looking at the stats from the servers I could probably push that to 60 easily as well).

Updated the firmware on them? I think the drives you are talking about are the old Vertex ones - they were quite buggy to say the least...

Cheers for the mentions guys @MrWu you maybe intrested in my latest project - Series: Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm « my world of IT We have custom built some RDS servers using 2U cases (2 in each case cookie sheet style!) and they run off.......SATA SSDs Personaly though I will be sticking with PCI-E in things like my HP servers - at least I know 100% that the RAID array wont muck up on me.

Have known about the end of TMG for a while back now - real shame as for about £600 a year we can have firewall, webfiltering and VPN for an entire school and it just runs on a Hyper-V VM. At least they are sticking with UAG...for now...very useful as a remote access portal for us

ICT Direct guys have already found me an option - just waiting on SMT to approve spend. Cheers

Any option to just upgrade whatever server you have already? Also if you are in striped and mirrored (maybe you mean RAID 0+1) what about moving to just RAID1 or RAID5?

How many users and how much storage do you need? We spent about £670 on hardware and about £50 on a Win Server Licence on this server - Inside a new Storage Server | my world of IT

10zigs here - Linux OS and Citrix VDI in a box to run the VDI end of things. Have quite a few videos on my schools YouTube page about them - Fitzharrys School IT Department - YouTube

Have only just started replacing our 4:3s with widescreens - in all honisty the monitors we've got have been going for 7+ years with no issues and are only putting replacements in to make sure we have some stock for any that blow up. All the same a recent fresh install for a primary we did (with old CRT screens) was all 21.5" BenQ LED wide screens and they look great

The recovery partition is purely there if you want to restore the PC back to the manufactures default install of Windows. We completely blank every desktop that comes in and put on our own OS image (Windows 7 at the moment) on it and in the process destroy the recovery partition as it is of no use for us.

Or maybe a SD card reader in the front of your PC?

Off the internet for our background - Glow wallpaper 001 by ~yvaine2010 on deviantART Just mashed in the text

Ours at the moment