maniac

Well Rage are on the line up, it'll be awesome! I saw them at Reading in 2008 - brilliant! And I managed to grab me a ticket to their free gig in June so I'm happy! Probably not going this year, mainly because I can't find anyone who wants to go this year! Mike.

I would be looking at available options to expand that storage in that situation, as well as introducing a quota system. I would say in this day and age an average of less than 1GB per student is not really enough. Of course if you've no available funds to expand the storage, then you just gotta make do the best you can with what you've got. Mike.

My quota system is inherantly flawed in that if every student used their quota, there wouldn't be enough space, but in reality this doesn't happen. We have 450 students, and a 1TB of storage allocated between them. Most students are fairly sensible with their file storage, the quotas are only there to stop those that aren't, and shouldn't impact on the students ability to use the machines effectively - if it did we would review it immediatly.

Year 7's 250mb Year 8's 500MB Year 9's 1GB Year 10 2GB Year 11 3 GB 6th Form 4GB If there's particular needs, we extend their quota by applying the next level up to that student. The only reason we impose quotas is to stop them filling up their areas with MP3 files, which given half the chance they will do! Staff have un-limited space, but a 10GB 'Soft Quota' which will e-mail them when they've exceeded it and remind them to check their file storage. Same again at 20GB and 30GB. Mike.

Classroom left empty with projector on, I just turn it off. Never had anyone complain yet. Gave up leaving nice notes, never works.

Excellent use of SQL injection, if it worked that would be extreemly funny.

Be careful, some of the gasses released when Lead Acid batteries, such as those in UPS systems, are malfunctioning or overcharged can be quite poisonous. The Batteries used in UPS systems should be sealed, so if it's producing a sulphurous smell then it's most likely got a small leak somewhere and should be changed ASAP. Mike.

Hmmm, lets see. 11 years of driving and the most I've ever paid for a car was £1600, that was a Vauxhall Cavalier 2.0 16v CDX, lovely car but very tempermental. Current car, 1995 Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6i - paid £300 for it and had it almost 3 years, straight through MOTs everytime. Put about 50k miles on it in that time. However she's getting as bit ropey now as I have literally done nothing to maintain the car since I've had it, there's now a crack in the windscreen courtesy of a lorry 2 weeks ago and the left hand mirror is missing where I miss-judged my driveway when I first moved into this house. Still MOT'd and Taxed until June - will scrap her then I think and get something else. Mike.

Thought about it, but as staff never read the e-mails I send them anyway it seems pointless. I ocassionaly get items put on the weekly bulletin senior management send out.

Yeah, I must admit I did build that MSI on the wrong workstation, I usually use a clean build, but this one must have had kaspersky on for some reason - thought I'd already been through and removed them all.

I hate to tell you you're wrong, but you're wrong. The 1000BASE-T standard requires all 4 pairs regardless of what cable it goes through. Cat 5, 5e and cat 6 cable are all acceptable as long as the cable is terminated correctly. Mike.

I double checked what I was reading earlier, but alas I read my council tax bill correctly the first time, damn!

Nice to see some positve comments for Viglen, they've really got their act together recently it would seem. I slightly reluctantly purchased 30 Viglen L60 laptops in July last year for our new enterprise suite. I say slightly reluctantly, I really wanted to go with Dell, but Viglen offered such a good spec at a very good price with the same warranty deal I couldn't ignore it, so we went with them. So far, so good - we've only had one breakdown, which was a dodgey screen. Reported it yesterday and was very pleasently surprised to get an engineer visit today, not that I should have been as we paid for next business day warranty on them, but past experience with Viglen taught me that this rarely happened, but they proved me wrong I'm pleased to say! The only gripe I have with them is that you can't buy the screens as a seperate spare part from viglen themselves, as we had one that was vandalised and broken - obviously not covered by the warranty, but I managed to source one from elsewhere very easily, so I'm not too fussed by this. Also their other spare parts (apart from the screens) are reasonably priced. Keyboards are £25 each, Vs dells £35 each, power adapters are £25 each, vs Dells £30-£35 each so it really is a win all round. If you're looking for kit, it is well worth giving Viglen a call, I have enough confidence to recommend them again now. Mike.

This stems from a conversation I recently had with a friend who saw my house for the first time the other day, it went something like this. "Wow, I thought your house would be full of all the latest gadgets?" "Why's that?" "Well you work with all this technology at work, it's just a bit different to what I imagined" We then had a long conversation about where the pre-conception comes from that because I happen to work with all the technology at work, people would also expect to find my house kitted out with it. We never really reached a conclusion, except to say I don't see the point in buying something I don't need, or replacing something that works. He's right thou, my house is like a relic from the mid to late 1990's mainly because it was then I got my first proper job, and could actually afford to buy stuff. I've just never bothered replacing it because, to be honest, I don't see the point. For example my TV is a big chunky old CRT one, my DVD player dates from 1998, my stereo setup from 1996, surround sound amp from early 2000's, even my mobile phone is 4 years old and I only changed that because I had to. I don't have an I-pod or PDA or organiser or even a personal laptop (although I do have a work one) My PC is about 4 years old, again only changed because I had to. I do have a flat screen monitor, but that to is about 6 years old. My digital camera is about 6 years old, my printer is an old laserjet 4 from the mid 90's etc. etc. So are you a technology guru who just has to have the latest gadget, or are there other people like me, who may work with some pretty good technology, but don't really buy into it personally - not because you can't afford to or aren't aware of it, but purely through choice? Discuss . . . . Mike.

The food here is pretty good, although I only ever have the baguettes which are baked off that morning, so are nice and fresh. They also have a brilliant Coronation chicken sandwhich filling, although apparently I'm the only one who ever buys it! The food here is quite heavily subsedised by the school, you only pay £1.75 for a starter, main course and desert or drink. I think that's pretty reasonable. We also have a large % of free school meals amongst our students. Staff get a lunch for free as long as they eat it in the canteen. I tend to buy my food at break time and pay for it, that way I can eat it in my office

If I'm using my car for work, and I have an accident in that time, I'm covered by the academies insurance. I can't remember how much per mile I get, it's reasonably generous. I travel between here and our other federated schools quite a lot, so I claim milage fairly frequently, although not as often as I should. Mike.

Un Zip it, you'll see everything you need then. WinInstall LE builds MSI's in weird ways, but they work - that's all I care about! Mke.

Just had to tweek the MSI, it was built with WinInstall LE and as such it managed to pick up a load of stuff it didn't actually need, so just spent a while removing the un-necessary bits. Please test first - it works for me, but I offer no garuntee with it. Mike. Battery Monitor.zip

I use the Import/Export tape options to Eject and Insert tapes to and from our tape library, it saves me messing with the front panel of the tape loader to remove and add tapes. The problem is that the Export job takes over 40 minutes to complete, although it does it's job very quickly - i.e the tape is moved to the mailslot, and I can remove it after about 30 seconds, but the job sits there still running for a further 39 minutes for some reason. When it eventually completes, it reports a sucess. Similar with the import job, except this time it take ages before it actually moves the tape from the mailslot on the loader to the right slot, takes about 20 minutes for the job to report a success - so that's 1 hour just to complete an export and import of a tape - that can't be right can it?? We're running backup exec 11d with an Overland LTO4 tape changer. Everything else works brilliantly on it, the system backs up extreemly well. Anyone got any idea what I might be able to change to rectify the issue of exporting and importing tapes, as it's bugging me. We can live with it, but I'd rather it worked a bit more swiftly than this if possible. Mike.

Been looking for something like this for ages, infact I posted a thread over 2 years ago asking the very question (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/16134-laptop-battery-monitor.html) and evaluated all sorts of programs along the way, but all the other ones I've looked at have been naff. Because we hide the system tray on our student machines they don't get the battery warnings on laptops or any ability to check the battery level, however this handy program solves that problem very nicely - why can't windows have this built in! Osiris Development - BatteryBar, the most accurate battery meter for Windows This runs in its basic form as freeware, but there is a pro version you can buy that does all sorts of other fancy things - unfortunitely its biggest downfall is the students can activate the 30day trial of the pro version, but because we run mandatory profiles here that resets itself when they logoff as the settings file is stored in the profile. I'm sure some students will fiddle, but none of the settings are saved, a small price to pay for the fact that it does exactly what I need it to and exactly what staff have been asking for for ages. Hope someone else finds it useful. Also I've packaged this as an MSI if anyone wants it let me know Mike.

Just started googling for this problem, and this thread on another forum HP P3005 Formatter card problems. - fixyourownprinter.com is very interesting reading for anyone with these sorts of problems. Mike.

Seems like this is a common problem then. I'm definitely not buying HP any more, after this and a series of other problems I just have little to no confidence in them. I've started looking at Xerox printers, as we have one of these in our staffroom and it's the most reliable printer we have, and well built as well. Mike.

I've got an HP 3005n which needs a new formatter board - it's sticks on startup with a memory error, but the main memory is part of the board. It's only 18 months old, but far enough out of warranty for HP to tell me to go away (which is fair enough) and want to charge me lots to fix it (They don't supply the parts to end users ) So can anyone help me get hold of a formatter board for this printer to I can put it back in use - it'll be a shame to have to scrap it for the sake of a circuit board - the rest of the printer is absolutely fine. Part number is Q7848-60002 I have googled, which brought up a handful of sellers selling second hand parts, but none of the UK ones I rang actually had it in stock. Cheers Mike.

Silly suggestion, have you tried it in a different USB port? I had a simelar problem, which I in-advertantly solved by changing the USB port the dongle was plugged in. I have no idea why it should make any difference, but it certainly seemed to solve the problem I was having. Mike.

That prices people like me out of the market then. The only way I can afford to own a car is by buying a 15yr old banger for £350 and running it for as long as possible (Current car is a Vauxhall Cavalier that I've owned for 3 yrs now - cost £350) Then you get onto the environmental impact of making a new car vs the environmental impact of running an old one etc. etc. I don't think that is the ultimate answer, the real solution is finding a viable alturnative to petrol for fuel, and sinking significant investment into it to make it attractive to consumers.