maniac

I spend £40 a week just getting to work, it's crazy. Mind you, go back about 10 years and I remember paying about 69p a litre, so within 10 years we've seen about an 75% increase. The oil industry fix the prices, as soon as there's excess oil in the system, they slow down supplies to artificially increase prices. Anyone remember the massive decrease around the time the credit crunch kicked in, less demand and there was suddenly too much so they slowed supply and slowly the price krept back up - crafty. Mike.

Thanks, however the first reply offered what I needed, just tested it on one machine and it's perfect for staff as it's easy to use! Cheers Mike.

As title, I could do with an MSI for any PDF creation software like Primo PDF, Cute PDF or simelar. I want to start encouraging the staff to PDF documents when uploading to the learning platform, rather than uploading word documents or power points all the time, but alas I didn't put a PDF creator on our staff build for some odd reason. Anyone able to help me, or point me in the right direction? Mike.

Happy Birthday

I had the same one earlier, didn't take a screenshot thou - I hope it's not intentional of edugeek, and is just one of the advertisers maybe overstepping the mark slightly. Regardless of how much revenue it might generate the site, this sort of advertising really irritates me.

What's more annoying is when they've spoken to an 'expert' at 'Insert name of high street retailer here' and they were recommended that machine, which they then subsequently bring to you because it won't run 'Insert name of latest game that teenage son wants loaded on it here' then they get all agitated when you tell them they need a better machine. People assume just because it's new, it must be better which is not necessarily the case as we know. My 3yr old core 2 duo machine still boots windows faster than a majority of new machines because all the componants were hand picked to work perfectally with each other, I've no intention of changing it soon either.

To get 5.1 surround, you're going to need an external amp, but unfortunitely they tend to be a little on the large side. You can probably pick up one second hand on E-bay for between £40 - £80 for a cheap one. However depending on the quality of the speakers, you may be better off buying a cheap 5.1 speaker set for around £99 upwards, you'll get everything you need in one pack. BEWARE thou, some of the cheaper 5.1 sets are only Dolby Pro-Logic and not Dolby Digital - to get proper 5.1 surround as recorded on the DVD you need to get a set which is Dolby Digital and has a digital input (either co-ax or Fibre Optic) I assume the DVD player has a digital output, I've never seen one which hasn't. Mike.

Yes, I am watching the development of SSD's very carefully - at the moment the capacity lets them down, but 5yrs time I think we could be onto a winner with SSDs. My reply wasn't a dig at you by the way, there's a few people on here saying 'home built NAS box' or simelar, I just hope these devices are up to task for all those involved. Mike.

Quite a lot of modern 'building management systems' talk over the ICT network, so it's certainly not that un-common to have networking in plantrooms these days. However for a lot of older buildings of course they don't have such systems so you're going to have to get it put in I guess. I'd just run some cat 5 above the ceiling to the nearest cabinet, no need for a terribly neat installation if it's only in a cupboard. Mike.

. . . . . but it is a beatboxing dog. Beatbox - Tele2 Was proving a bit of a distraction for the kids in English earlier, I really didn't want to block it either. Mike.

We even have problems here with some of our smaller Year 7's, their finger print just isn't well enough defined for the system to pick it up properly. I would have thought this would be even more of a problem at primary level. We've about 3 or 4 students who just have account numbers and don't use the biometric system. Unfortunitely this means they have to top up on-line or by giving money to our finance person as they can't use the cash loaders. Mike.

You say you've got 7 years worth of their PCs in your school, if you were that disappointed with them then why did you continute to buy them?

LTO tapes have a lifetime of approximately 200 read/writes of the entire tape - to be a bit conservative I look to replace the tapes when they reach around 150 total read/writes or the tape reports its first error - whichever occurs first. I estimate it'll be 2 years before I'll need to replace any media unless any develops faults. With hard drives, it's much more difficult to estimate their lifetime as there are many more varying factors that can influence how long a Hard Drive lasts for - we've probably all had the dreaded server re-boot that's caused a drive failure. It's this sort of failure that you just don't get with tape, tape tends to degrade gradually and backup software reports errors long before the media physically fails - discs don't tend to do this and are prone to sudden failures. Knowing my data is safe on a system purposely designed and tested for backup purposes rather than a hashed together NAS box or simelar helps me sleep better at night. I think some people don't class backup systems as a priority, and will just 'make do' with whatever that have or can get their hands on, where as I see it as one of the most important componants of the system - it's the one part you really don't want to let you down - ever! I have suffered data loss in a previous job, and it's no laughing matter - jobs have been lost, luckily I didn't lose mine, but there were some very tough questions asked. Not a position I ever want to be in again! Mike.

Bromcom used to buy back the old folders to cannabalise for spares as they no longer produce them, and there's still a surprising number of schools using their origenal system. Mike.

I've literally just implemented a new backup solution here, which is a nice shiny new LTO4 tape changer. 800GB native, 1.6TB compressed. I did look at disk to disk to tape solutions, but to do that properly was out of our price range. To rely solely on Harddrives as your backup solution I personaly think is a bad idea. I'm now able to do a full backup every night, as the system only takes about 4hrs to backup 450GB of data, compared to the old AIT3 tape changer which it replaced which took over 24hrs to do the same. I keep 1 tape every friday which are over written every month, and 1 end of month tape which is kept for 12 months. Mike.

Solved this in the end, purely by chance. Basically I ran a restore on the security settings of the affected machine by using the command secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose Which put right whatever was wrong. I was origenally trying to solve another problem, but it's also solved this one as well - bonus! Still have no idea what caused the problem in the first place, but at lease I can fix it now! Mike.

Super Mandatory profiles here, and my login times are around 30-50 seconds depending on the age of the machine. I don't let cached profiles build up on the machines, keeps everything working better. We don't re-direct app data, as we find it causes all sorts of problems, but we re-direct start menus, and desktops to local folders on the machine, and My Documents to the students network share. I've always set a target time of 1 minute for login, I think that's acceptable in most circumstances. Mike.

Absolutely not true. I've had many many credit cards and accounts over my life, I tend to move the balance around a lot - normally every 12 months or so, and I have an excellent credit score and got a good deal on a mortgage last year. Actually having too many accounts can do the opposite, as if you've already got too much credit in your name, even if you're not using it, they will lend you less on a mortgage. However at the moment I'm a bit miffed at the banks, as I wanted to combine my credit card debt together with another loan I'm already repaying which would lower my overall monthly outgoings by quite a bit, but at last enquiry the bank with the existing loan won't re-finance it or extend it, so got to go elsewhere which is a shame. Mike.

1 set of OS installation CDs + license keys 1 Portable HDD with images of all our major servers on Backup Tapes Media for Backup Exec including licenses Driver CDs for servers Detailed sheet stating how the servers are currently setup, e.g the partition sizes, share names, security settings, what services are installed on each server and any customisations and tweeks we've had to make to them over their lifetime (when we remember to record the information) Flow chart showing the restore process for each server and a rough order of processes. Most of this is in a fireproof box in our office and there's a duplicate in the main school safe (apart from the backup tape of course) plus an encrypted memorystick with most of the above on in electronic format that I keep at home just in case - nothing confidential on it, just the OS installation media, driver CDs, backup exec etc. on there as disk images and all the documentation. It's not all been fully tested, but I can't think of how I could be more comprehensive. Mike.

Monday - Thursday tapes are over written every week 4 Friday tapes on Rotation, over written every month 12 end of Month tapes, over written every year. I've never seen any justification for keeping a backup any longer than this. Works for us, although I've never had to recover work from them as we run shadow copies which goes back 60 days at the click of a mouse - most students should hopefully realise their work is missing within this time! Mike.

Can't believe this story still makes the news. A school I previously worked had had cameras in the toilets over 10 years ago, and my previous school did and still does. The one I work at now used to until they got vandalised, and we chose not to replace them. There are quite strict guidelines for placing them from what I remember. Mike.

This article explains it all. It's all to do with how hard drives operate at sector level. Why we need 4k drives Mike.

If they try sending any mail to another student it bounces back with a non-delivery report, but they can still send to anywhere else. This is the easiest and best method I've found of putting this sort of restriction in place, but if anyone else can think of a better way then please feel free to post it. Mike.

Not sure about CC4, but I used the same script on CC3 with no adverse affects. Mike.

That's allocation units - we're talking a layer below that; the actual sectors on the drive itself. An allocation unit or data cluster can be made up of multiple sectors which is why you have the options available in windows, the smallest you can go is a single sector, i.e 512 bytes. Under the new standard, the smallest you could go would be 4kb instead of 512 bytes like now. Mike.