maniac

I've never used it on windows 7 so I'm not really in a position to help you much, sorry! The basic functions of the script are fairly simple, so as a guess I would say it's a permissions problem with the location you are copying the icons from, as oppose to a permissions problem on the local machine, because it has sucessfully created the folders so you know it is able to write to the C:\

We have a full sitewide CCTV system profesionally installed. Cameras in all the ICT suites and monitoring the locations where the laptop cabinets are stored, recorded on a DM Sprite 2 DVR. There's 30 cameras in all, although its getting a bit old now and the quality could be better. Staff just accept it as it's been here so long now, and it's proved useful on many ocassions. Mike.

Yes we move equipment around the school a lot to make sure the needs of the individual/department are met by the equipment we give them. This doesn't necessarily mean we'll replace equipment at a set interval thou, I evaluate it and decide when it's appropreate. E.g last year we decided to decomission all the Staff D520 laptops because they were really showing their age and we were getting lots of complaints about them. These were simply moved into use by students in certain areas of the school where they could still be useful instead of buying those areas new equiment which would have been wasted on them.

In my opinion you have to compromise between what is ideal from a support/technical persepctive and what is ideal from a financial persepctive. You have to admit that getting rid of a computer just because it's hit 3yrs old doesn't make economic sense, but then the other extreme of keeping machines until they literally stop working also doesn't make sense, the compromise is somewhere inbetween. What I do here is evaluate our estate of machines at regular intervals throughout the year and make decisions on whether to start retiring certain types of machine based on various factors. The number of support calls to them for hardware failures, the cost of and availability of spare parts and the ability of the machine to still function to an acceptable level are the main factors I will look at, along with the quantity of them still in use and the physical appearance of them. What I tend to do is retire a percentage of older machines at stratigic points in order to supply spare parts to keep the rest going for a while longer. It's all about flexibility in my opinion, money is tight so you've got to compromise. Mike.

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Just keep piling the pressure on them to sort the issues out - you have a warranty so make sure you use it and if the machine isn't working properly, ensure you're chasing up support calls and putting on the pressure while making is perfectally clear you're not happy, obviously keep it professioanl thou. Legally it's a different situation from the rights you'd have as a consumer, and it's much more difficult to return goods outright and claim your money back. However if you don't ask you won't get, so it may be worth having a conversation with your account manager along those lines if the replacement machines are still causing the same issues, or maybe suggest they replace them with a different machine from their range if they aren't performing.

You're definitely not the only school reporting problems, as I've had multiple calls since November 2010 regarding our one.

They are built by Stone to order as far as I know and I expect the componants are sourced in bulk from a mass producer somewhere, possibly on an exclusive deal as I've never seen never Stone laptop chassis used by other manufacturers as sometimes happens with others. These particular machines are very slimline and lightweight which is what attracted me to buy one, but I do wonder if they've created problems in making the laptop so slim. I have tried googling some of the details on the chassis labels, but it turned up nothing of interest a few weeks ago.

Yes, I've had exactly the same problem with the only one of these I brought for a member of staff. I could never replecate the error in testing, so I was skeptical about whether the user was using the laptop on their lap or something and blocking the vents etc. Stone replaced the main board for me, but apparently the laptop was still experiencing the problem, so they are now sending me a new unit. I'm concerned to hear you've been having the same issues thou, I just hope that the replacement they send doesn't suffer from the same. I suggest contacting Adam Jones who is the UK schools manager, very helpful guy and I'm sure he'll do his best to get the issues resolved for you. PM me if you'd like his direct dial, as I don't really want to post that on a public forum. Incidently we stress tested the one we had with a benchmarking utility and we couldn't replicate the error even with the processor running at 100% for half an hour and the machine getting toasty warm. Mike.

For all the world to see is my music library as it stood in around 1998/1999 ish still on my lineone webspace which amazingly still works! Winamp Generated PlayList

Brilliant thread . . . . . .

I think some people miss-understand that SIMS stores all it's old data in-definitely in its live database and you can go back and view it at any point, just search for a student record and change the filter to 'ever on roll' and you'll see all your old student records still there. When you see standards like 'must keep records for 7 years' that doesn't mean you have to keep the backup tape from 7 years ago for that length of time, as all the information is still accessible in the live system (you just need to ensure it is backed up in the normal way) When I used to have responsibility for backing up SIMS, I used a normal tape rotation consisting of mon-thurs tapes that were re-used weekly, 4 friday tapes used in rotation and 12 end of month tapes and even that is quite over the top in my opinion as the data on any tape more than a few weeks old would be so out of date it would be useless. Mike.

We pay our LEA £500 a year and they backup SIMS for us via our WAN. SIMS is the one system I do my best to have absolutely nothing to do with, and by enlarge I succeed.

We have some rooms with permanetly cabled in DVD/Video players - mainly the science labs and English rooms as those two subjects show a lot of DVDs, and it is awkward to adjust the volume on those speakers with the controls at the rear. Looping through the PC is just adding an un-necessary level of complecation in my opinion.

I absolutely hate these speakers, this is what our IWB installers used on a majority of our boards. There's several flaws with them. 1) Whatever you set the volume level to, people love to fiddle except they can't see which control is which so they all get moved and you end up with the balance and tone all over the place 2) The Phono plugs are so close to the wall that the cable is bent very sharply, putting a lot of strain on the connector. If the speakers get moved a lot, this invariablely leads to the cables being damaged or the plugs being snapped off on the back of the speakers - I have 2 or 3 sets in my office that have suffered because of this. 3) I find them awkward to get off and on the brackets. Saying that, the sound quality from them is actually quite good, I just think they're a poor design. Mike.

+1 for vision. We kited out our 3 new ICT rooms with vision speakers and the little wall mountable amps and they've been brilliant these last 18 months. The wall mounted speakers are better than the ones you can mount in ceiling tiles we've found, and we run 4 speakers per amp so the teacher can have the volume lower as there's speakers halfway down the room as well as at the front - the specs of the amp say this is OK. Mike.

You have to be careful running copper between different buildings because of the potential earth difference between them, it can cause problems if you're not careful. I can understand the need to rationalise cabinets as I did the same when I started where I am now - we had cabinets everywhere when I started! Slowly over the last 2 years I've managed to get rid of 3 of them so it's a bit more sensible now. However I would never consider getting rid of all of them back to a central location unless that location had proper decent easy to follow cable trays/trunking going out to all the locations necessary, otherwise it makes adding additional network points very difficult and very expensive. The best I would hope for would be 1 cabinet in each building and a good multi core fibre link back to the main comms cabinet, but having all the copper connections running back to a cabinet in another building is an un-wise thing to do in my opinion.

Windows server 2003 based box with FSRM on to manage quotas etc. It has 1.8TB of storage in 8 x 300GB SCSI 320 drives setup in RAID 5+1 and 4 spare slots still. Linked to our network with 2x1gb link that are bridged. Generally very reliable, although server 2003 is showing its age now and there are much better solutions out there. It works thou, and is quite quick.

If I was shopping for a brand new solution I probably wouldn't consider Cisco as they are expensive, but as we already have the APs, it makes sense to keep that infrastructure and just get a proper controller for them to make my life easier. A quick google suggests I can get a 4402 controller for around £4000 so it seems like a good interim solution if I can get the spending agreed. Thanks guys. Mike.

Securus - brought before I started and not used now because it slows the workstations down too much and SMG agreed we could do without it, we're still paying for it on a 3 year agreement thou. The VLE was starting to look like that, but we've got a Teacher championing it now and really pushing it, so it's use is on the up. The mac suite we have is underused, but has seen an increase as well recently. The main problem we have with these is my lack of knowledge of macs, so I find it difficult to support them. Generally thou, if we buy something it is brought with a purpose and I will push its use as much as I can. Sometimes it's just simply informing staff what systems we actually have available on site, as most of them are un-aware of the full facilities we have - this happened recently with the boardworks packages of which we have plenty and they are all loaded in the VLE and available for use, but hardly anyone uses them at the moment - that's my next big push to try and encourage them to be used more. Mike.

Hello everyone, Our wireless network is slowly showing its age, and is starting to become problematic in areas of our building. At the moment it is made up from 37 Cisco 1200 series access points which are all indipendantly configured to create site wide coverage. This includes adjusting the transmitter power and setting the channel numbers manually to avoid where possible interfearance. I've now had enough of chasing problems around the building, and I need a re-think on how to solve these on going problems. Obviously Cisco make controllers for their access points, so hopefully someone with slightly better knowledge of Cisco hardware can tell me if it's possible to get a controller which will let me manage the 1200 series access points properly, as I know these are fairly old now so it might not be possible to get hardware to support them any more. I know this will be fairly expensive, but it's probably cheaper to buy a controller for what we already have than investing in a whole new network (which we can't do at the moment anyway as we are only 18 months away from our new building and they don't want to make big investments like this if possible) Any help appreciated Mike.

Bit late ec94210 as we've been using it for a few months now, but thanks for the information. They have recently updated their client, so there's a chance they have resolved this security flaw, but I'm just about to check and see. It's installed on a server anyway which only system admins can log onto so it's not a major concern, although I agree it shouldn't be stored in clear text. Mike.

Depends what it is I'm shopping for. Getting cabling installed, we have a local company as an appointed contractor who gives us a fair rate. PC's I generally buy from Stone, but have varied a couple of times when there's been particularly good deals from other suppliers. Toners we use our local branch of cartridge world, they drop them off the next day in their van. Other items, I usually send out a request to 2 or 3 different companies and see what they come back with as the prices of different items can vary a lot, I will then pick one and negotiate on that. Sometimes if we need something quickly thou, we'll just nip out and buy it with petty cash Mike.

Hi everyone, I'm really hoping someone can help me solve a few issues I have with our macs on our network. We have an OSx server together with a 2003 domain, and we have the clients authenticating to the domain as well as workstation restrictions being applied by the OSx server, that all works well - when it works that is. The first problem is that the macs randomly lose their binding to active directory, complaining that they can't see the directory server. This happens about every 4-6 weeks but not always on all the macs, some seem to do it more often than others, there's no real pattern to it. I can fix this temporarily by un-binding and re-binding the mac to AD and it's then OK for another few weeks. The second problem concerns the use of memory cards. Whenever a user inserts a memorycard into the reader on the mac the machine needs an admin username and password in order to mount the folder to the desktop, is there a way of avoiding this? The thrid provlem involves the use of i-movie, whenever a user tried importing a video clip into the program, it complains that it 'cannot copy the file xxxxxx' error -43 but doesn't tell me where it's trying to copy it to so I've no idea where to start with this problem. The 4th problem is to do with proxy authentication, and the fact that students have to re-insert the username and password to authenticate to the proxy - is there as way of getting macs to transparently authenticate to these servers in the same way windows machines do. We get the same issues when printing, they have to re-authenticate to the print server before they can send a job to print. Any help with these issues would be greatly received. cheers, Mike.

Someone hasn't read the whole thread lol