jamesfed

You can certainly get projectors that run over a LAN (Windows 7 has 'Connect to a network projector' built right into the OS) however I'm not too sure about something that runs over Wi-Fi as you would have bandwidth and latency issues.

Anything that works for you My biggest concern about 7 to 8 year long software refreshes is that the pace of technology development has increased so dramatically especially in the world of Virtualisation both Application and Desktop both of which makes it very easy to deploy the latest and greatest but not always stuff that’s old.... therefor limiting yourself to something that’s old also limits your potential to expand into other newer technologies. Either way all of this has been discussed a million times before and this thread isn't the place for further discussion.

I was in referance to 'You could save money and time on your exchange licensing by ditching exchange in favour of google apps.' and by using Live@Edu getting Exchange all the same. Also if EES cost you more money when factoring in future upgrades then something is going wrong somewhere....

Or just go with Live@Edu and get the same experiace as you do already Either way all Office 2010 here - dirt cheap on EES and oh so simple to deploy and patch. From a teaching POV in a world where Office still reigns suprime (and no I don't want any links to the 10% of companies that have changed to Google) it makes sense to educate with what people will be using - expecily on the point of things like Access/VB/Ect

Grand stuff - just take note that it needs a power supply as well

120Gb SSD here so no space for 2 partitions! I use VirtualBox as well to run multiple OSes (at the same time) as well so no need for a 2nd partition. We used to have 2 partitions on teacher laptops one parition dedicated to personal data (photos and other such junk) however we have now stopped that pratice and just use Windows PE to copy the files off in the event that the OS needs a reimage. Virtual host servers (which use local disks) have one small (60GB) partition for Windows Server Hyper-V and then the rest of the disk is there to store VHDs. Virtual Machine Servers are all a small partition for OS + the key application that the server runs (e.g. TMG 2010/WDS) then a second partition for data for those applications (log files/images ect). PCs are all single partition.

Something like this would work - Silverstone La Scala HTPC ATX Black no PSU (SST-LC17B) - dabs.com Cost is pretty high though and you need a PSU.

You are going to be hard pushed to find a case that you can put a monitor on with that many drive bays - Closest I know of is this - Novatech Opera Media Centre Case 2x ODD and 2x 3.5" HDD It is full ATX though...

Are we talking a gaming level or case or more something with just a tone of drive bays? I've always liked the fractal design cases like this one - Fractal Design Core 3000 Midi Tower Chassis - Aria PC However at the moment I've got an Asus TA-M11 - Asus TA-M11 Midi Tower Case with No PSU - Black/Silver: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

If you SERIOUSLY only want to do physical servers I'd look at something like the HP DL385 G7s - 8 SFF hard drive bays with the option to expand to 16 not to mention more RAM capacity than you could ever need and the ability to use the AMD Opteron 8 and 12 core processors. Should come out at about £2,500 per server...... However I would suggest you look again at virtualisation. Here we have 2x HP DL165 G7s (1U version of the above server), same 8/12 core processors - just hook them up to a HP SmartArray and use the new SAS dual port tech to connect the array up to both servers using SAS cables this is wayy cheaper and in many ways faster than iSCSI SANs (not to mention much cheaper). All of the applications you have up there are very read/write intensive so look for faster disks as well. Just in case you are not aware the key advantages of Virtualisation are- High Availability - one host server goes down the other can take over - thus meaning no network downtime. Lower power usage - less servers with more RAM/processor/HDD resources will chew through less power than more servers with lower resources Easy future transfers of OSes - moving OSes around is as easy as cut and paste Faster response to future needs - if in the future you need a new service which has to run inside its own server OS then you will need to buy a new server...with VMs just start a new virtual machine (at worst maybe get some more RAM) and quite a few more things!!

No dual monitors here (yet) - all admin staff have 19" displays and all teaching have their laptops with no external display. Biggest monitors in the school is the 22" that we have in the IT office.

I do hope HP just break off the PCs section into a subsidiary or something similar - I just wouldn't want to see Dell become the #1 in the Windows PC world again. Never had a problem with any HP kit - its all HP servers, printers and switches here and a mix of Acer and HP for the Laptops/Desktops and I wouldn't want to touch any other kit with a barge pole.

No VLANs here however the Aerohive Wireless has a built in firewall which can be assigned per SSID - this way on the student WiFi only ports 80, 443 and not much else are allowed but everything else (including traffic to our servers) is restricted. Internet traffic all goes through TMG 2010 which does malware inspection of the traffic as well. We've looked at IPSec before as well and that will probably make a showing at some stage.

Just out of intrest can the server see its own drives when you are trying to run the recovery? You could check that by running diskpart from the command prompt.

Oxfordshire County Council just went the way of Netsweeper - we were one of 3 schools that said a firm NO! We now run TMG 2010 and haven't looked back Our internet connection still goes through the County Council and they apply a level of web filtering that they say blocks the 'hard stuff' and quite simply on the first day of pointing our TMG server at their new web filter we couldn't actually Google search the words 'Hard disk'! With any luck next year (or the year after) we will be totally free off OCC for internet

Backing up to local disk appears to work fine - 500MB/min + so it must be something to do with the tape drive. To bad its a SCSI would love it to be SAS!

Just updated everything that I coud on both the agent and media server but appears to be no change. I did notice that the media server backing up its self is plenty fast enough however anything over the network goes at a snails pace. One thing I didn't mention - all our servers with the agent on are running inside Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Virtual Machines. Just playing around with Jumbo Frames and offload but it dosn't seem to be doing anything...

For a long time now our backups to tape using BackupExec 12.5 have been very slow (as low as 110MB/min) and I have only just gotten round to looking at sorting this. The situation is one 2008 server connected to a LTO4 Tandburg tape drive backing up other servers using the Symentec remote agent. One thing that I did spot is that the servers on which the remote agent is install are using the power of an entire processing core running the remote agent even though very little data is going over the NIC - in fact the NICs usage during the backup can regularly be seen at 0%. Any clues?

That sounds like fun....... oh no wait...they are actually human beings with human rights - darn it!

Certainly some kind of reprimand is required but it should be on a case by case basis - jail time, community service and loss of benefits seem to be the key ones people are talking about. Maybe we should be looking at getting them out in 3rd world countries handing out meals to the starving would help…. Just made it on to the site as well - the petition is up to 97,189.

Did you download the ISO version of the VLSC? If so one possible problem with the install could be the files are corrupted in some way and just need re downloading.

Personally I just wish the e-petitions site would actually work! Have visited it a number of times over the past week and only once did I get close to signing up for anything Yet another government IT project that doesn’t work…….

Dabs Link - this is where I got mine - £199.99 at the moment (although I think I paied about £230 when it first came out). There is a slightly cheaper version as well which comes with only 1GB of RAM instead of the full 2GB. Its a very long card as well - could probably do with a quick measure first.

Can pickup a AMD 6950 for about £200 now You need two PCI card slots spare and it'll take 2x graphics card power cables but it is one beast that just dosn't stop. Haven't seen its clock speed usage go over 60% when playing Crysis 2 at 1080p.

Guys lets remember as said by the OP this is for a parent monitoring a child - still plenty of legal things to go through but we are not looking at a school/business situation here.