maniac

I've worked hard to standardise the printers in this school, we have CP3505's as our main colour lasers with a very old but functional HP 8500n as a shared colour printer in our main ICT area. Art have an HP3500 printer which is very old, but still works well (when they don't load damp paper in it which gets jammed in the smallest fragments deep inside the printer ) B/W's are HP 2015 in the smaller offices, and HP3005 and 4200 series printers in the larger offices and some departments. If we buy new ones I try my best to buy the same models where ever I can get them as they're good printers and we already stock the toner. We have a Xerox printer in our staff room which was a special offer from our printer supplier, this has proved a solid work horse, so I'd possibly be looking to by Xerox as our next batch of printers - can't really keep buying the same ones forever much as I'd like to, and like you the recent offerings from HP don't look too appealing. Anyone notice the product lifecycle from HP is much shorter than it used to be, they always seem to be introducing new models which do the same as the old ones, look almost the same but frustratingly the same toners won't fit! What happened to doing a whole run of different printers which all used the same toner? They all seem model specific these days.

I have an amstrad emulator and an absolute ton of software for it, but there's nothing quite like the real thing! Not sure about the Pet coming with a monitor, that bit of information was something I just seem to remember, but seeing as I was only 3 when the Amstard first came onto the market, I may be wrong! I slightly gutted in that my Dad had every issue of Amstrad Action Magazine from issue 1 in 1985 right upto when it stoped around 1995 I believe, including all the cover tapes and discs - but he chucked the lot out only last year. Mike.

What did I do . . . Took two boot loads of stuff to the Dump, and got confused by all the different recycling containers that have sprung up in recent times - Got shouted at by some big burly bloke for putting something in the wrong bin - carpet is Textiles isn't it??? Sanded down the plasterwork in the kitchen ready for painting and nearly suffocated as a result. Spent the afernoon cleaning plasterdust off everything in the house. The door was closed with a cloth wedged at the bottom of it - how does it find a way through everytime So yeah, that was Valentines day!

That's brilliant, made me laugh.

Wait for it, in 28 days time they'll have a special offer - 95% off

1981 - I dunno I got bored reading it.

I think there was a thread on here a while back with a shattered one - don't think anyone was injured thou.

Forget your Commodore 64, this is what you wanted http://www.erksoft.gr/oscommerce/catalog/images/Amstrad_CPC464.jpg I had one of these for years, learnt to program it quite well as well. We also had the 3" disc drive, and a very slow dot matrix printer to go with it. I think each disc stored 160k, and they were double sided, you actually turned the disc over to access the other side of it! I believe it was one of the first computers to be marketed to home consumers that came with a dedicated monitor, so you didn't have to use your tele - genius! Unfortunitely ours is no more, it went wrong a long time ago. I've often thought about buying another one thou. Mike.

Foam cleaner seems to work for me. Not sure if it's supposed to be used on them, but it seems to do the job and leaves a smeer free finish. Mike.

Projector and whiteboard servicing for us this holiday, well overdue. Also rounding up those rougue machines the virus checker's reporting as out of touch for more than 30 days - can bet your life they're broken machines that no one's bothered to tell us about. Mike.

Made me laugh, but only because it was so blatently staged.

Just what is that drivvvvvvvel That guy has the most irritating voice ever.

You should definitly write a book on organising yourself and time managemet, you sound like you've got it sussed - if only I could be half as organised!

I PDF everything and I've got it all stored in a folder on a shared drive both me and my Technician have access to. Eventually this is going to transfer to the learning platform, where we're going to form a staff knowledge base as well so staff can get help doing the things they ask about the most. Mike.

While I can see the advantages of this casio projector, I will still be sticking with traditional ones. We find we have to change projectors not because the bulb goes or they malfunction, but because the technology moves on at such a pace the old projectors become obsolete very quickly. Very few projectors made a few years ago support widescreen resolutions properly, which makes them useless for modern laptops, and very few of them have HDMI inputs which are now starting to appear on everything, so who know what the next phase in technology will be which could make the projectors of today redundant within a few years anyway? Makes a long lamp life kinda pointless from that perspective. Food for thought. Mike.

Kaspersky was very easy to setup, but I find its deployment mechanism a bit clunky and prefer to install it manualy from the KLSHARE file share it sets up on the server. Not sure how well it handles un-installing other virus programs, as we introduced it as part of our new network, so everything was a clean image anyway. The only thing I've had problems with using Kaspersky is the updates on wireless laptops, but I've written a script to overcome this which forces an update once a week regardless of what the admin console tells it to do - this has worked and turned all my red computers green in the console (You can find it in the script section on this site) Also watch for the proactive protection feature (or whatever it's called) as I found this tended to stop legitimate programs like lanschool from running as well as having a massive performance hit on the machines, so I've turned that off school wide now. Mike.

This is very true, the fixed infrastructure, i.e the Cat 5/6 cabling is normally the responsibility of the building contractor, so the less they have to fit, the cheaper the build costs and the more profit they make. I've had to negotiate very hard recently for our new build project to ensure we have adequate cabling provision throughout the building. The origenal number of network outlets we were told we could have was totally in-adequate. They will budge on these matters, but you need to push it and make sure you can fully justify your recommendations. Mike.

That's a very sweeping statement that's simply not true. Not ALL new schools use laptops and wireless as their only ICT provision. There are some that take this approach granted, but this is where you have to make absolutely sure the school is aware of the repercussions of its decisions in terms of higher maintenance costs, possible reliability issues with wireless depending on the investment they make, increased likelyhood of theft, generally increased cost of purchasing in the first place and the logevity of laptops is not as good as desktops etc. etc. If it's the advisors/archetects giving that opinion, don't be afraid to ask them why that is, and for examples of where this is being done sucessfully in a simelar school to the one being designed - they should be happy to provide this information as if they're recomending it then they should have case studies etc. they can refer to. You can then arrange visits, or chat to the people at those schools and find out all the facts, does it work? what would they have done differently? etc. and if at that point you still think wireless only is not the best way forward, put together a well structured series of recomendations in writing to the archetects, designers, senior management etc. In the course of my research for our new build I've only found a very few schools using 100% laptops, most have at least 1 room of desktop PCs, even primaries. Mike.

Probably. We do have a seperate office/workshop thou which I've had benching installed round one end of so we've got a proper place to work on laptops etc. The rule in the office is no working on machines at your desk - use the workshop! Sounds like you need more space, it's no fun working in the same room as the servers. You could try the health and safety card to persuade management to do this - they're pretty loud those things

There's been 2 posts on simelar articles. (can't find them at the moment) It's nothing new really, my old LEA published an article over 2 years ago stating the same thing, they've never changed anything thou. I won't state my view again, it's already on one of the other posts. Mike.

I will try this, but I think it's a much more deep problem than just autoplay being messed up, the laptop just doesn't recognise the disc properly in the first place so treats it as a data disc and brings up the contents of the disc in a folder, which is what autoplay is set to do for data discs. Mike.

I never install the actual programs, (like wireless management utilities etc) I only install the drivers and do away with the extra programs, therefore it probably won't have the storage management utility on it - do you think that will make a difference? In the system tray you have the network icons, Fog service, Volume, Truecrypt, Lanschool Teachers console, Updates and eject hardware icon and Promethean whiteboard tray icon. All our laptops are identical in this.

It's definitely using the right chipset driver, I've already checked this. The laptop builds were all done independently of each other for each model, and this problem is affecting more than one different model - the first one I discovered was a much newer E5500 Dell laptop, the one pictured above is an 18month old Dell D530 both with exactly the same problem. I'm going to build one from scratch during Halfterm and then do our build process one program at a time and see if I can work out at what point it goes wrong. Cheers for your help Mike.

OK, this issue is much more widespread than I thought - it's affecting a lot of our staff laptops, but seemingly not all. This occured on a Dell D530 earlier. Call - Can't play DVD on Laptop. Attend call, and find it's the same issue, so I spent about half an hour fiddling around and trying some of the suggestions, and it made no difference, but I did notice the following. If the laptop is booted with the DVD in the drive, then it starts up fine, and recognises the DVD as normal, as per the screen dump below. http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/firstboot.jpg Then I ejected it, nothing wrong here recognises it as a DVD / CDRW drive which is correct for this laptop. http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/afterejectingit.jpg Put the disc back in and this happens http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/puttingitbackinagain.jpg and take it out again and this happens http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/afterejectingit2ndtime.jpg This squence of events happens in the same way on any machine that's suffering from it. I've un-installed CDburnerXP which we had on all the laptops to see if it made any difference, and just in case also un-installed the Klite codec pack which we also had installed No difference. I'm running out of options - next I'm going to have to re-build my staff build from scratch to see if I can work out where it's gone wrong. Anyone got any further suggestions? Mike.

Also use LanSchool here, currently 7.3 but will update it soon I think. Works well on almost 500 machines that we have and slowly training teachers on a 1 to 1 basis on using it. The best bit is for roaming laptops you can build student lists so it doesn't matter what machine the student logs into they will still appear in your console - that works well in our flexible learning spaces. Mike.