maniac

It's not a good idea to mix different types of fibre as you will get loss. However it will work, but you may notice a performance drop. I recall having no choise but to mix fibres at one school I worked at on account of not being able to get hold of patch leads with the correct fitting on in the correct size when we needed them. They were eventually replaced with the right ones, but for the short time they were miss-matched they worked fine, the switch just gumbled every now and then about lost packets or alignment errors. Mike.

If they're HP printers, then there's usually two types of toners available for most B/W printers. 'A' toners which are low capacity and 'X' toners which are high capacity - HP sell both themselves, but most compatibles are high capacity 'X' versions, however they offer no more capacity than the 'X' varients you can buy from HP themselves.

I just watch everything on TVcatchup.com - my PC is pretty much always on, and linked to my TV and the streaming is excellent quality. To be fair thou the only reason I do it this way is because my aerial blew down in the wind and I really can't be bothered to fit a new one, and the Aerial place up the road want £250 to do it. I did have sky, but never watched it so cancelled the subscription last year, plus the dish never received it properly anyway, as there's a very thick hedge behind my house which absorbs most of the signal. Mike

It is true that cables can be made directional and the difference can be scientifically measured using very sensitive instruments, but in reality it makes no difference in the sound you perceive, it really doesn't. You'll get more loss through the connections between the amp and the cable and the speaker and the cable than any suposed gain you might get from directional cable. This also goes for silver cable and anything gold plated - the only use they have (apart from looking nice) is they do stop oxidation at the exposed ends, but in themselves don't really offer any notable improvement over copper. I actually use mains cable for my speaker wire and it sounds absolutely fine, and it's a lot cheaper. I measured the resistance of mains cable against some 12 guage speaker cable and there was such a tiny difference it wasn't worth worrying about.

For listening to music a sub is pretty un-necessary unless you're listening to drum and bass or other electronic type music specifically designed to be listened to with a sub. However they do add more depth to films. On my Front Room cinema setup, if I'm listening to music I turn it to 2ch mode, I only use the surround mode for films. As for 7.1 - there's still a lot of films that aren't encoded in it, although most blu-ray stuff is now. Personally I find it hard to tell the subtle difference between 7.1 and a well setup 5.1 system having listened to both at times, I don't think it's worth the extra expense, but if you've got the room and the money to do it when why not. Mike.

One of the reasons I like NAD equipment, they're more realistic with their output ratings, but they always perform far in excess of what you'd expect for the quoted power. The NAD L40 I have is rated at 30w per channel, but it sounds much louder and clearer than more powerful amps I've had from other companies in the past, and drives big speakers with ease. I've had it rigged up to the B&W 603's I have which are rated at 150w and it drives them hard when you turn it up - it will fill a medium sized hall with ease at about 60% volume on the 603's and sounds crystal clear.

Whoops, failed to notice that.

I've had rediculous amounts of hi-fi gear over the years. Not so much now thou. In my back room I have a simple NAD L40 linked up to my PC, with a pair of B&W 601 speakers - sounds really nice a clear. In my front room I have a Sony STR-DB870 QS surround sound amplifier, Pioneer DV-636D DVD player, B&W 603 floor standing speakers for the fronts, KEF Q95 Centre speaker, AEL 400W subwoofer and currently no rear speakers. Both systems are linked so I can have the same source playing in both rooms should I want it. I got rid of my seperate CD player and tape deck ages ago, as I pretty much listen to all my music from the PC these days and the NAD L40 has a CD player built in should I want to use it. I did have a pretty nice record deck to go with it, but it got dropped and badly damaged when I moved, and I never replaced it. Sold it on e-bay as spare or repair in the end. Pretty happy with the sound in both rooms and it's far too loud for a small terraced house. I probably won't change any of it now until it eventually goes wrong, I've owned it all for about 8 years now thou and it's still going strong! Mike

The best implementation of this type of scheme in my opinion is rather than a 'bring your own laptop' the school partners with a company and offers laptops or other mobile devices to parents/students on a buy in scheme, that way you get to control the types of machines in use and students get their own laptop to use in school and at home. There's lots of companies who will administer these types of schemes for you. Yes there are lots of issues to over come, but if the school wants to achieve a 1 to 1 pupil to device ratio, it's virtually impossible for the school to supply them and foot the bill. Of course you still have to maintain a stock of machines for some students to use in school, and provide a decent back end to the network for the devices to use whether than be citrix type systems, cloud based systems or something else. There are organisations like the e-learning foundation who will help schools setup a 'buy in' scheme and help you chose the right approach for your school, offer advice on the best ways to implement the scheme etc. e-Learning Foundation - About Us well worth investigating if this might be a better approach rather than a free for all bring in what you like approach. Mike.

Admin and SLT staff have un-restricted printing here, everyone else is limited. We make use of department accounts within papercut to try and encourage department leaders to take responsibility for their departments printing. Each department gets 500 credits per member of full time teaching staff per term. colour prints cost 2 credits and B/W cost 1 credit per print. Copies are limited to 3 as we try and encourage the use of photocopying if they need class sets of printouts as it's cheaper. No repeat printing within 3 minutes either. Generally staff have accepted this, although some departments still manage their budgets badly and run out before the end of term regularly. It has dramatically reduced out printing costs, although there's room for improvement as I still regularly find loads of disgarded printouts on the printers in the staffroom.

I watched quite a bit of the live broadcast on the BBC radio 1 website - I've listened to Chris Moyles for years since he came to radio 1 in the 90's and I'm quite a fan of his broadcasting. Yes he makes ill guided statements sometimes, and he's a bit silly sometimes, but it's all good fun. There were some brilliant moments throughout the 52 hours, some of the video highlights are quality.

We've got 1 NC10 in our school brought as a trial unit and used daily now by a student who requires his own laptop in lessons, we've not had this problem but we have had the power button fail and the battery annoyingly malfunctioned after only just 18 months. A quick google reveals a lot of others with the same issues , so there may be a case for them to admit a problem, however I'm willing to bet they won't do this willingly. Blank white screen SAMSUNG NC10 WHITE SCREEN PROBLEM - boards.ie White screen on Samsung NP-NC10 netbook - General-Laptops-Notebooks - Laptops-Notebooks There's LOTS more as well! The NC10 page on Wikipedia mentions it as well: Samsung NC10 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Mike.

We've been using samsung LCD TV's for our digital signage, we have 4 x 32" ones around the school, and a 42" one in Science. The oldest is now about 2 1/2 years old and still works good as new. They are so much cheaper than commercial displays and in my opinion it's worth gambling possible warranty issues against the cost saving. (Each 32" screen cost £300 and the 42" one was just over £400.) They are linked to laptops which are up in the ceiling voids above the screens, and are set to power on automatically on weekdays at 7:00am and power off automatically at 6:00pm although I can change this centrally if necessary. The screens just fall into standby mode when they lose the signal from the laptop. The system uses Xibo to deliver the content and so far I've not had one screen fail, although one of the laptops packed up the other week. Mike.

I recall our one and only 1515n printer playing up like this when we first set it up on server 2003. I seem to recall we upgraded the firmware on the printer which solved the problem, although it was a while back now.

Personally I think there's too many sub-forums on here already with some of them like Learning Network Manager and Physical security and many others hardly having any posts in them, some of the forums have zero posts in them, and forums still exist like the 'edugeek conference 2009' which is obviously way out of date and in my opinion should be archived somewhere other than the main forums. I personally find it rather hard sometimes to find the appropreate forum for a post because the division between them is so specific sometimes. For example do we really need seperate forums for server 2003, server 2008 and server 2008 R2, can't it all be under 'windows server platform' with a drop down box on the thread title to tag threads with the appropreate version of the OS? Just my thoughts. Mike.

We have briefly looked into moving away from our LEA for our broadband, but by the time we factored in all the added benefits we get like web filtering thrown in for free, e-mail SPAM filtering thrown in for free, router and firewall, support for it all as well, and the fact we can easily create network links between other schools we are associated with in order to share systems and resources should we want to, we decided (for now at least) we are better where we are. The Kent Public Service Network, which is what our broadband is part of, is generally very reliable, very fast and very flexible and I have few complaints.

We ocassionally get days like this, normally it's a Monday when you've just arrived and there's already half a dozen jobs waiting for you on the helpdesk. Don't think I've had our helpdesk down to 0 jobs for a very long time, there's always that one or two jobs on hold that we're waiting for parts for.

I've managed to dig up the code for this project from an old backup, so I've made a few updates to the program. * Fixed the problem with it only displaying Year 12 on the year 12/13 button * Fixed the problem on the settings screen with the program always expecting something in the 'OU' field even when it wasn't needed * Sort of fixed the focus on the password box if you choose to password protect the program (It appears at the front, but not as the focus, but it does stop it being hidden behind the program which was happening) * It no longer creates a txt file when you run the program - this was a legacy left from one of the script examples I used when I first wrote the program * Settings are no longer available from a button within the program to make it more difficult to alter them. You can change the program settings using the arguement /S when running the program to bring up the settings box - I may change this back, but certainly in my school I've had a few teachers fiddle with the settings when I'd rather they didn't. I'm afraid if you have changed settings in the old program, this new verion won't remember them as I've managed to change the settings location from using my name to using easy_password_reset as the directory in the user profile. In theory if you copied the settings file to the new directory, it should read it from there, but it might be easier to just program the settings again. The 'full cutomisation' option is still not available, I'm working on the code for this at the moment. Other features I will write in if people want to request them. Incidentally, how many people are actually using this program - be interested to know? Mike. Easy Password Reset 2.0.zip Oh and the version number is 2.2 now, but I forgot to rename the .exe

Not a problem, I hadn't mentioned that problem anywhere on this thread so you wern't to know. The reason it doesn't display the upper 6th is because for each button I simply copied and pasted the Year 7 code and changed the values for the search accordingly, forgetting that the 6th form spans 2 intake years. If I still had the code I could correct this very easily. Mike.

Our electrical wiring in this building is a nightmare - it was substantially re-wired in the 1990's, but still far from adequate. One of the first things I got done when I started was to get a dedicated feed from the main DB to the server room, as we had the breakers trip 3 times in the first few months I was here because the existing DB feeding the server room was overloaded. Since then, no problems.

Because I messed up the code slightly in the latest version and didn't realise. We don't have a 6th form here which is why I didn't notice, but it was pointed out to me by another school a while back. Unfortunitely I've lost the source code for this program since I wrote it, so I can no longer make any changes or improvements to it, so if it doesn't work for you there's little I can do to correct any faults. In a majority of situations the software does work - the only faults I'm aware of are the custom settings part was never written to a working standard and the 'upper sixth' users don't display in the program anywhere. In all other respects the program works. If anyone has a way of de-compiling a program writtin in VB.NET 2008 please let me know, then I might be able to carry on where I left of with this - the idea of re-writing the entire thing does not appeal. Mike.

I've got a set of the new coins stuck to my wall in the right shape. I did have a pound coin next to it as well, but I must have borrowed this at some point when I was short of cash. Quite sadly I've also collected a complete set from 2008, 2009 and most of a 2010 set - (need a 50p and £1 to coomplete)

Brown sauce of course. Now there's an interesting idea, I have however finished the pancakes now as well. Me and my lodger had differing opinions on the best way of cooking them mind, so we did some his way and some mine. Mine are of course nicer, a fact he fearcely disputes

We hit our drives with a club hammer until the platters break inside if we're disposing of them for good. For the few laptops we've passed onto other places, we've used the full disk wipe option on fog which takes a while but seems to do a through job. I've tried file recovery software on a drive afterwards and only succeded in getting a list of some file names but no actual data back which was re-assuring. It takes a long time to do the full wipe thou. Mike

Forgot it was pancake day today, tescos just down the road thou so I shall go and buy the necessary bits when I finished this particularly tasty bacon sandwich.