maniac

Or you could do what he said Didn't know that utility existed, you learn something new everyday, that was todays lesson.

Might be worth deleting the local version of the print driver from that machine. When windows machines make their first connection to a printer the machine makes a local copy of the printer driver. It's possible this may be corrupted which could give the results you're having. Check the folder C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers If I remember rightly you can quite happily delete the contents of this folder, although you may have to boot in safe mode to do so. Windows will then re-copy the files from the server when it re-creates the printer connection. (Just to be safe, I'd back the files up somewhere before deleting them) Be careful if you have software like PDF creating utilities that use a virtual printer, as they also stash files in this directory, so deleting them can mess them up, problem is sometimes it's difficult to pick out what files relate to what driver as a lot of them just get put here by printer drivers not in subdirectories. Mike.

Based in my neck of the woods as well, might update the old CV and apply, see what happens.

Most filterless or low maintenance projectors are DLP - beware that the colour definition on these is not as good as an LCD projector. We constantly get complaints about the DLP projectors we have, so we've stuck with LCD ones for our latest purchases. Mike.

I use a simple .REG registry file which is called by a startup script. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] "ScreenSaveTimeOut"="600" "ScreenSaveActive"="1" "SCRNSAVE.EXE"="c:\\screensaver\\screensaver.scr" Mike.

Interesting one. Moodle (Technical Editor) (Sevenoaks) - delivered by JobsInKent.com

Do you block the BNP website for students? Whatever you personal views may be on what the party stands for, they are still a valid political party in this country and therefore do we have the right to influence students policially by blocking their website? I know you have to tread carefully when teaching History not to influence students politically, so obviously we have to do the same with Website content to make sure we aren't being unfair against a particular party. Would blocking their website be seen a political influence, or can we justify it because of the extreme views the party has? Please not I'm not a supporter of the party in any way shape or form, but I am keen to make sure I don't make judgements like this based on my own personal views, as there are many many other websites I'd block if it was a personal decision making process. What do you think? Mike.

A lot of manufacturers will do imaging for free when you buy new machines, but never actually employed an outside company to do this as I've never even considered outsourcing this task. If you're quoting to do this for someone, charge per day and find out as much information as possible. Also be careful if you're creating the image from scratch, as if there's problems in the future it could come and bite you on the arse. Make sure the client specifies exactly what they want on the image even down to addons like Flash, JAVA etc. That way it takes some of the burden of remembering to include everything off your shoulders. Mike.

Hmmm, I'm 28 and I don't think I've learnt yet. . . . . Larry Millar 5 stages of drinking always pops into my mind at these moments [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piPyfqAKf6o&feature=related]YouTube- Larry Miller Drinking[/ame] What stage was Edutech at?? Mike.

I use Dell laptops as the clients, and schedule a shutdown at 7:00pm by simply adding the shutdown command as a scheduled task - "shutdown -F -S -T 0" and the BIOS has a feature that you can set it to auto power on on Mon-Fri only which is set to turn it on at 7:00am. The machine starts up and automatically runs the Xibo client. The samsung screens we have automatically go into standby mode if they receive no signal for 10 mins however they do need to be turned on manually. Simple, we asked the receptionist to do it, it's her first job of the morning. Works for us.

Having just moved into my first house a few months ago, I'm still getting a ton of mail for the previous occupant. I have no forwarding address, as unfortunitely the lady who owned the property passed away, and I keep dumping items in the mail box with 'No longer known at this address' written on the front of them, but I'm still getting a ton of mail which is starting to get annoying. Any one got ideas on the best way of stopping it? Mike.

On next years Bett list, a massive UPS to run the whole stand from then . . . .

Signatures are a poor form of identity confirmation anyway, mine never looks the same twice ever. I frequently used to sign totally differently when you used to sign for Debit card transactions, never ever got questioned about it once. I guess my point is if someone was going to steal your identity, stealing your actual signature is probably the least of their problems, they would just make one up and use it and no one would be any wiser. Mike.

I would try changing the kernel, it's easy to do from the menus within Fog. usually find it solves most problems of this sort of nature. Mike.

Might be helpful if we have a little more information on your school What you currently have? Primary or secondary (or equivalents for where you are located) Number of students and teachers? Number of workstations? Split this into number of hard wired workstations and number of wireless laptops. Other services to be run onsite? How many rooms is the new building going to have? basically as much relevant information as you can give, then people can put forward some recomendations based on your requirements. Also what sort of budget have you got to play with, it all makes a difference. Mike.

About time they did something new, it's been a while.

Our chargers end up all over the place - wish I could claim under warranty for them, but I've no idea if they were purchased with laptops that are in warranty or not. Should really label them as they come in I suppose. We've just ordered a load at £25 each, that's not too bad really. Mike.

I'm looking for something that's network attached so I can put it in the remote building and forget about it. We will still do a removeable backup once a week probably to tape, or maybe removeable HDD depending on what I decide on. Thanks for the suggestion thou, Mike.

We're using Its learning here, and it's been relatively speaking OK. They've got a new service and way of importing users now, so its links better with your MIS system, there were some teething problems with this but it seems to be working now - their support was very helpful throughout this process. It's been a bit hit and miss recently with regards to reliability, but they do keep you informed of the problems quite promtly by e-mail so can't complain too much about that. So far all the problems have been out of hours, and havn't affected the use of it too badly. We've had several problems with SCORM content working properly. I think this is mainly to do with the fact that the SCORM content seems to be served from a non secure server which confuses internet explorer as it's displaying a mixed content page. Even with the option turned on to allow this, it still doesn't always work properly for us. This is only on some packages however, so it may be the packages fault, or the platforms fault we simply don't really know at the moment - the issue is on going. Overall the staff and students like using it and find it quite intuative, and it does have a lot of features. The costs are reasonable for what you get in my opinion. Regards, Mike.

I'm looking into our backup solution at the moment, and because we have a totally seperate building with a spare pair of fibres running to it, I'm looking at Disk backup solutions and to place over there on their own dedicated link, to stop me having to backup to tape every night using our very old tape changer, but what to buy? I see two solutons - a Basic NAS box using backup to disk using BackupExec 11d or a proper Disk backup device which uses iSCSI or simelar which Backupexec can talk to directly, but I've not had a lot of luck finding appropreate products. Anyone already using disk backup (I know lots of you are) who could share information on their setup and how well it performs, what products they brought etc? Our current full backup is around 350GB, but this is fast expanding. (It currently takes us 4 tapes to do a full backup, which is becoming a pain.) I'm looking for a device with a capacity of at least 2TB ideally - this gives us plenty of space for the time being. Regards, Mike.

Was just on my way to work this morning when I got the call. Why couldn't he have rung 5 minutes earlier then I woudn't have had to wrestle my car back onto the driveway!!

There are 4 seperate plugs feeding the cabinet, each one has 7 laptops plugged into it and each plug has a seperate surge filter. The failed chargers were all over the place in the cabinet so they weren't all powered from the same feed, so I doubt this could be the cause. I doubt I'll ever find why they've failed, it's just un-expected and no real logical reason why so many should fail at once like this so I thought I'd see if other people have had simelar problems before. Mike.

Tell me about it - we are currently in laptop battery hell as a lot of ours are now dying as they get older, but the laptops themselves are perfectally fine, just the batteries that are useless. The day a company invents a battery which can last as long as the laptop can't come too soon. Still at least the Lithium batteries we have now are better than the Ni-Mh of Ni-cd of old.

We've got all our laptop cabinets plugged in via surge filters, which is what makes it even more puzzling. I'm pretty sure it is just a bad batch, but was just interested incase anyone else had experienced simelar problems with the same sort of Dell chargers. Mike.

We have a spate recently of Dell laptop chargers failing. We expect them every so often, but I've just removed 7 faulty ones from one cabinet which is a very large number. The thing we've noticed about the failed ones is they are all the same design - Dell have 2 or 3 different power supplies - they all output the same, but they have different AC leads. The one's that have failed all have the 2 pin AC inlet with no earth connection which I think is significant. There were 3 pin power supplies in the same cabinet, and none of these have failed at all. Has anyone else had a large number of these fail, or any suggestions as to why these particular chargers are failing more than the rest? Cheers Mike.