maniac

Yes, it's all about having a plan. We have relatively good procedures for reporting damage, A good asset management system which keeps track of where all our machines are, which ones are in for repair etc. and a rolling replacement program. Machines are distributed evenly amongst departments so each department has a mix of old and new machines to make it as fair as possible. The school should have a 3-5 year ICT plan which should forecast projected spending and tie in with other plans like future expansion plans, increased rolls and changes in the curriculum e.g BTEC courses have a heavy reliance on ICT so these need to be catered for. If the costs of maintenance haven't been considered then it's your job to highlight that, and if SMT don't allow you a decent budget to maintain equipment then do what I do and pass complaints from staff about the facilities on to them. It's all about getting the balance correct - you can't just keep adding machines left right and centre without considering the long term implications. Equally so, it's important to make sure there is enough access to facilties to allow the students to complete their courses sucessfully and the teachers to use ICT without having to many restrictions on accessibility. If there's a constant battle amongst staff to access facilities then you've not got enough. If there's groups of machines sitting not being used then you've got too much, or it's not being used effectively. All of these issues can be drafted into a long term plan together with costings and a 10% contigency if possible as there's always unforeseen problems or issues which will need emegency spending to address them - e.g it's difficult to predict when things like projector bulbs will need replacing. Mike.

It does work, but only if its managed well and the money and resources are there to support it. Our PCs are carefully managed and I do draw the line with some departments like our science department who wanted some Desktop PCs and wanted to retain all their laptops as well - they were told they would lose 1 laptop for every desktop PC they got given so settled for 30 desktops - 15 in 2 labs and a cabinet of 30 laptops. With more and more reliance on ICT in lesssons, it's hard to be able to justify standing in the way of expansion, but you do need a plan to go with it. I think we are better resourced ICT wise than pratically any other school I've been to which works 2 fold. On one hand the staff can use ICT in any lesson they want to without having to book a facility. On the other hand, it does create an over reliance on ICT from some staff members, and if the system is down for any reason it causes a massive amount of disruption. At any one time in the school there's usually over 200 students using computers out of a total roll of 450. In exchange for getting the facilities they do, departments do have to be responsible for their own sets of machines, and vandalism and damage to machines is charged to department budgets. It costs alot to run as well, as they are mainly laptops, and we replace around 20% of our batteries a year and quite a few screens, keyboards and power supplies. I think I spent around £10,000 keeping all our laptops functioning last year, only half of this was for repairing vandalism, the other half was replacing parts which had malfunctioned, particularly batteries. Mike.

Departments have to pay for the replacements, it's the only way. Amazing how many "lost" remotes were found when I announced this. For our new build wall mounted controls have been specified for all rooms. I'm quite liking some of the equipment Vision are producing, I used their moduler wallplates when re-fitting our business and enterprise rooms last year, mainly because I could wire them easily myself as they use screw terminals and not soldered ones even for the VGA connection - a definitel win! Their wall mounted amps are pretty good as well, as are their speakers. Mike.

I've become a little bit of an expert on lynchpin as we had a LOT of issues to start with, but they are all resolved now. Mght be better to start a new thread rather than continue on this one, and I'll reply on that. Mike.

True, we have version 10.5 which is the latest version as we pay annual maintenance on it to allow us to keep it up-to-date. I'm not sure on the older version as every version I've used has this option. Version 7.5 must be pretty old. Mike.

Look in the file config.properties. Make sure the line that says noquit reads "noquit=Y" and is uncommented, this will stop the client being exited by students. Mike.

You could get really in depth with this (I haven't actually downloaded your code and tried it yet by the way) and write into it the facility to construct a toner order within it, which can be allocated an order number within the program and saved. Then a 'booking in' section for when the order arrives which you could input the cost for each cartridge ordered and confirm the quantities. That can then be saved to the database and tied to that order number so the system will then be aware of the cost of every cartridge you have in stock. Whenever you change a toner you can be prompted for the order number the toner cartridge came from, and it can automatically produce a charge sheet with the exact cost on which can be handed to the finance department to move the money around. Of course it does complicate the code quite a bit, and relies on you writing the order number on the end of the boxes when they arrive. Just an idea. Mike.

Become someone who people remember, and you can talk your way into pretty much any job you want with enough practise.

500ish student PC's and lets see . . . . 450 students, so that's more than one PC per student. OK admitedly some of our machines are getting on a bit, but while they still work they get kept and pushed into a back corner of the school somehwhere. Most of them do get regularly used as well. Mike.

I'd also recommend Panasonic! My parents have a 42" panasonic flatscreen, and it's quite simply brilliant. They also brought a panasonic DVD recorder/Video player/Hard drive recorder to go with it which has been faultless. As others have said, the built in speakers are usually pretty poor on flat screens, so I'd buy a decent set of spakers to go with the TV - my parents got some samsung ones which also had a DVD player built into them which is handy. Still by far the best quality images I've seen from a flatscreen TV. I have a very old Sony 28" CRT T.V in my house, the damn thing just keeps going - 8 years old now and it still works as well as the day I got it. Until it goes wrong I can't justify replacing it, looks like I may have it a while longer I think. Saying that, for watching DVDs and normal TV it's absolutely fine, even if it does take up quite a bit of room. Mike.

Brilliant, but way out our price range unfortununitely.

It needs to be a direct connection really to retain the quality of the output, as it is for music afterall.

Interesting one. Our music teacher wants a way of connecting the audio from the 12 macs we have in the music tech room to the amplifier at the front of the classroom. The wiring is easy, I can buy wall plates with 2 phono plugs on for £2 each, and run the wires to an RCA patch panel in a central location, that's relatively easy to do. What I'm having trouble doing is finding a way of switching between channels. There's no amplifier in existance with 12 inputs, and I can't find a simple switch box for that many channels, so my other option is a mixing desk, but again 12 stereo channels is impossible to find. Any suggestions? Has anyone else done this sort of thing "on the cheap" as we don't have a ton of cash to spend on this. I know there are extreemly expensive systems on the market to do this sort of thing, but we don't have that much to spend unfortunitely, and in theory it's actually not difficult to do, providing I can find the right type of switchbox. Failing everything else I may well build one myself, but I'd rather buy a ready made product off the shelf if possible. Mike.

Made me laugh, that's good enough for me!

I actually have a spare charger at work specifically for charging my phone. I also charge my personal laptop at work as well on the odd ocassion I bring it in, never thought twice about it to be honest.

Realising which thread this is - 2 years on and I actually found what I was looking for! http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/52597-handy-program-monitoring-laptop-battery-levels.html Mike

Actually wireless status would be a good one. I would happily allow the system tray if it wasn't full of other pointless icons that lead the kids into areas of the machine I'd rather they wern't poking around in. Companies like RM seem to have a way of controlling the system tray icons, but I've never found a foolproof way of doing this. Mike.

Edit, ignore that - you said VBA not VBS.

It's not just the time, it's the cost in fuel! My commute to work is about 16 miles, that's a 32 mile round trip. It costs me about £30 a week just for the petrol to get me to work and back, so that's £120 out of my wages just getting me to work!

I can see the logic in that approach, I've just never done mutiple partitions on a disk because most imaging systems won't handle them, single partition is all I've ever used. I used to partition my disks years ago but fell foul of the not making the partition big enough problem. If windows fails on a machine and I need to keep the data on it, I just pop an XP professional disc in and run the repair option, it sorts out most problems. Failing that, stick the disk in a external reader and back the data up before imaging it with a fresh image. Our laptops use offline files in windows and syncronise everytime the member of staff logs on or off. Staff are told to only save files to their my documents location, and we don't garuntee their data is safe if they put it anywhere else. This saves us dredging through laptop hard drives for odd folders of data here and there when we image them. I use fogproject.org for my imaging system, I manage over 600 machines using this for distributing my machine images to all of them - it can copy the image down from the server in about 5 minutes flat for a 10GB image.

I would get an efficient imaging system, and stick with a single partition. You really don't achieve much by having multiple partitions except make life more difficult for yourself in my opinion. You can still lock down areas of the drive so staff are forced to save only in a certain area of the drive (if they're saving locally that is.) or use offline files in a network situation. Mike.

Ahhh that would explain why there's a garunteed value after 5 years on all my Stone computers quotes now!

I'd avoid biometric systems with young kids, the system has trouble reading a lot of their finger prints. We have trouble with some of our year 7's with smaller fingers. Our system uses Digital Persona finger print sensors which are usually pretty good (particularly the newer ones that don't have the rubber coating on the glass) and is made by uniware. Generally I've been very happy with it, although it doesn't link to sims directly we have to add users manually to it which is a bit of a pain , but the system itself is very good. Mike.

I'm currently looking into mailing services for the academy which will allow us to bulk e-mail, text message parents etc. and I want to find a few so I can evaluate them side by side before we chose who to go with. The only problem is the only one I've found so far is parentmail, but I'm sure there are others that exist that I've seen mentioned on here in the past, so can anyone tell me the names of other companies which offer this service - I've not managed to find any by googling, but I'm probably using the wrong search terms to find them! cheers, Mike.

Anyone got any ideas what it's about? Normally there's a click throu, but not today. It is quite fun thou for all of 5 minutes, and I can see it being a major distraction for the kids, so I'm hedgeing my bets that at some point today I will probably be asked to block google. Mike.