jamesfed

In the next few days were going to be installing our shiny new virtual server (HP DL165 G7 in case anyone is wondering) and being the original series BSG watching geek I am I was wondering if anyone had a good name of a ‘code name’ for the project. The servers processors are the new AMD Magny-Cours series (which was my first thought) but I was looking for something a bit more punchy. So I’m open to suggestions

We usaly just get Vista Basic OEM lics (about £30-50 a pop) slap the sticker on the side of the PC and be done with it

Microsoft SharePoint Services has a plugin to make a IT helpdesk If your LP is based on SP then you should be able to mash it in with ease

Might it be a server that you would be better off without if its of that kind of age? If you need the seriously need the service thats its providing could you move that onto one of your other boxes or maybe implment a bit of virtulisation on one of your servers to run a second OS at the same time?

I'd say make sure you put together a good case before you take it to anyone. So start logging the faults that you come across (theres plenty of tools mentioned on here to do that but I prefer SharePoint). Also see if you can improve your current system of answering calls again recording your progress as you go along. After you have put together all your data put together some kind of proposal as to how having an aditional tech would help.

Did you remove the network adapter settings before you virtulised? You may find that the old hardware still has ahold of your IP adresses (even though its not in use).

I prefer to keep things in house but having Live@Edu and SIMS hosted at county has been a blessing.

Never a problem I used to do this with our HP Notebooks as it was impossible to inject some of the HP drivers into the RM PXE build process

Weve been using the Acer timeline notebook PCs as our stable diet for notebook trollys and staff notebooks and can't say that they have been blow par on our HP PCs at all. The one notebook that we did have a problem with before got sent off one day and came back two days later Oviously if Acer work Desktops under a diffrent department this could be a wholle diffrent story.

Have you looked at Live@Edu - free Exchange 2010 hosting for schools direct from Microsoft We use it and love it (well the features that our County Council like to let us use) and I'm sure many of the other posters on here would say the same

I'd say look at at least 6GB RAM min then - with idealy 2-4GB per DC. Sanpshots should never be used for DC backups there are a tonne of posts about them on the web but one of the best ones that I found (with some suggestions for alternatives) can be found here- Proper Backup/Restore Methods for a Small Business Server 2008 Running as a Virtual Machine - The Official SBS Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs Its about Small Buissness Server but the same applies

I've used it quite a number of times - has worked everytime but as said already its all about including as much info as possible.

You might want to have a look at the new HP G7s - they have much better energy saving features than the G6 and it could end up saving you in the long run. Also what are you running as your Server OS? (Im guessing Server 2008 R2 as thats the forum but its good to check)

If you use the second link you can send an email to Microsoft - if you give them enough information they can verify that you are who you say you are (even if you are doing this on behalf of a mate) and reset the password sending the details to your personal account.

Try this- Windows Live Sign-in Help Center - Reset Password If that dosn't work- https://windowslivehelp.com/PasswordReset.aspx Try and give as much info as possible

Try to get an intake/exaust system - thats where you have a fan sucking cool air in from the front and kicking hot hair out the back - I use 120mm fans in my gaming PC but 92mm fans (Im a fan (no pun intended) of Asksa/Enermax fans) would do perfectly in any normal PC - just make sure you get variable speed control. In the PC that I use in the office the only fans are in the PSU and on the CPU but thats a great big cooler so it keeps the whole system cool

They just use the usal Intel adapters - if RM are staying on the ball (and expecily if you bought the netbooks from RM) they should have the drivers out in the most recent driver packs. If not just install Windows 7 and use something like gimagex to do your own imgaging then smartclient away

Its my understanding that if you run Datacentre edition with Hyper-V on that particular server (that is running datacentre) you can have an unlimited number of Datacentre edition virtual servers running. Don't know anything about Windows XP for that kinda setup though.

Silverlight

By shares what do you mean? Are you mapping network drives?

Certainly going to be an interesting future - again were not looking at replacement PCs right now (and even if we were I think we'd be going thin client at the moment) but it’s an interesting discussion. One thing I was thinking about is how dual cores have been around for quite some time (since Windows XP) and here we are with Windows 7 and they still run great - will Windows 8 be any different? Especially if the use of graphics card acceleration gets more entangled into computer software design.

Too true - power consumption is always something I like to try and be mindful of - its more a thing of would Atom/Athlon/i3 be more sutible for a 'standard' school PC?

Good point - its just that I've never seen Photoshop (CS2) max out an Athlon II 240 (which I use as my CPU) and even Windows Live Movie Maker (running Windows 7) has a hard time of taking too long to encode the amount of HD video that the kids could ever be using.

Hi all, I was just wondering if anyone on here has been able to justify buying PCs in their schools the Intel i5/i7 or AMD Phenom II processors? Not that I'm looking into getting any (Atom/Athlon II works fine here!) I'm merely looking for some insights especially now that RM are trying to tout i5 in their models. Personally I consider these processors to be designed for gaming and that money could be better spent on higher speed RAM (and similar). Thanks, James

Server 2008 R2 - with RODC at your satellite office. Thin clients + Hyper-V Server Virtulisation with Citrix XenDesktop VDI would be be ideal world HP kit all the way (look for some kind of discount if you are buying tones of kit).