maniac

We hide the system tray completely on our network, and also all the BIOS settings are setup to stop the wireless being turned off using the function keys. Works for us Mike.

At my previous school we claimed these, was painless enough - filled in the form that came with each projector, and about 3 weeks later all the spare lamps came through the post. You're supposed to claim within 3 months of purchase, although it was nearer 6 when we eventually got round to sending in the forms, but they still sent them.

Generally I try and run it like this. Laptops and desktops are brought with 3yr warranties on, and are used as main-stream machines for this period. At the end of their 3 year period, they will be moved into areas of the school where lower specced machines can be used, normally areas of the school which require fewer machines as well, and some will be kept as replacements to swap out when machines fail. Most machines manage an additional 2 years in this situation, with the numbers dwindling towards the end of year 5. We are currently in this situation with our Dell D510 laptops and GX60 Desktops which are due for replacement this year, although there's a high chance the desktops may be pressed into service for one more year. At the end of year 5, the machines will be looked at for disposal or possibly thin client use in the future, or if they still work adequately a further year of use may be considered. Generally I try and replace 20% of my machines every year to make sure we don't end up in the situation where we can't sustain our own ICT. This means I have to buy at least 100 new machines a year to achieve this, and as we are expanding this number is going up. This year I really need to purchase at least 120 new machines thoughout the year. Servers are earmarked for replacement at 3yrs with the existing servers retained and moved to lesser roles, and anything over 5-6yrs in the server room would be looked at for disposal. Switch gear and infrastructure is on an 'as required' basis and isn't really budgeted for in the same way, there's just a chunk of money set aside, but nothing specific in the plan. To do this I have a budget of approximately 100k a year, but this includes absolutely everything from paying the LEA for the broadband, paying capita for SIMS, on-going subscriptions like virus checker renewals, VLE etc. all come out of that budget. Around half my budget gets spent on new hardware, another 10% or so is spent on spare parts to keep out of warranty and vandalised equipment working, a further approx 10% is consumables, and the rest is software, subscriptions, licensing, paying for contractors for cabling etc. Mike.

A quick google reveals these; Using Group Policy to Deploy Applications Deploying a MSI through GPO and possibly one of the most useful recources if you're trying to deploy applications AppDeploy.com - The Application Deployment Information Center Mike.

I have to say, I am still waiting for my edugeek prize from http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-edugeek-news-announcements/13366-edugeek-christmas-2007-competition - I'm guessing it must have accumulated some interest, so I'm expecting a top end gaming machine to be delivered any week now. . . . . . . Mike

20,010 now Is the next competition to guess what date and time someone will overtake Geoff as top poster? Edugeeks certainly come a long way since I joined, I remember the old PHPbb based forum, and the old logo that went with it, ahhhhh memories! Mike.

That's a shame, I said 3:05pm yesterday.

I started my current post on that sort of salary, if you're any good and the school's any good whoever gets the post won't be on that for long. It's not a big school, only 600 students so I think the salary is pitched quite well for the post in my opinion.

Have you checked the cable linking the server to the switch and/or tried another one, and if possible tried another switch. It sounds to me as if it could be related to something else other than the server its self. I know you've said another PC works fine in the network point, but if for instance the other PC had a 100mbs network card, but the server is gigabit this could make a difference. It could also be worth forcing thse server to use 100mbs if possible if it is gigabit, just to see if it makes a difference.

Have you got full error repoting turned on in PHP? It might give you a little more to go on if you haven't.

This was a meeting concerning our new build, so we had myself, business manager, one of our sponsors, the head of ICT from our sponsors company, Representitves from an IT consutants we're employing, our building contractors and arechtects and a Rep from KCC. I've not yet worked out what we achieved in the 2 hours I was there. Mike.

Not on SLT, but may as well be - some of the meetings I've been to this week, jeeeez, it like talking another language.

Another vote for Stone here, excellent prices and good service. We have about 75 Stone desktop PCs in this school now, and a set of 28 of their neo netbooks - which I have to say are rather good. Mike.

It's not the database lookups that are slow, I think it's the page generation that takes the time because it's a very feature rich interface with a lot of Javascript and other such things in it, it takes a while for their engine to parse the script, and a while for the client to load it. I've found the client performance has just as bigger impact on the speed it works at as the server does. Personally I really like Eclipse.net, it works very well for us, our LRC manager likes it as well, and the kids do to, so it's a win all round for us. I've also found their support to be pretty good on the few occassions I've had to call them, they were very helpful when we migrated it from the old server to the new one last summer. Don't get me wrong, the product, like every other piece of software, is not without its flaws and faults, but all in all I don't think it's that bad. Mike.

If you use hold and release queues for your students, like we do for some of our printers, make sure that within the printer security properties you select 'deny' for students to manage documents. If you don't, they can get round the system by un-pausing their own documents in the windows print queue. Although paper cut re-pauses them quickly, if they click it enough times eventually the job prints, and they also don't get charged for it! I've just plugged that flaw on my system, I'm not sure how many other people use a hold and release queue system (where print jobs have to be approved by the teacher before printing) but hopefully someone might find it useful Mike.

I've found you also have to re-initialise the offline file cache after disabling it if there are already items available offline. If you disable it via GPO then it still syncs the files already available offline before the policy change. If you change the policy, re-initialise the offline file cache then re-boot the laptop straight away it will disable offline files - bit of a pain I know, but it works. There is a registry hack somewhere you can use to remotely re-initialise the offline files cache, although I haven't got it to hand. To re-initialise the offline file cache manually however, goto folder options in control panel, offline files tab and hold down CTRL and Shift while clicking the button that says delete files. It should ask you if you want to re-initialise it, click yes and then re-boot the laptop. Mike.

We've brought a very simple piece of software to do this, it has an analogue clock, a digital readout of the time remaining, displays the start and end time of the exam and the schools centre number. The best bit about it is the exams officer can schedule them all in advance, so all she has to do in the actual exam is load the program, and select the exam they're sitting and all the information is there ready. We've given her an old D600 laptop setup as standalone to run it on, and it works a treat. Mike.

Never said it was technically right, but it's 'socially acceptable' which means it's good enough for me, after all as you say as long as it does it job, you do have to question does it really matter?

Look at letters you receive from companies, they never have punctuation - that's good enough for me.

Trying not to sound harsh, but I would probably lose my job if I did that. I've never come across a job which necessitated taking the servers offline, except for ocassional re-boots to apply updates and install new software. Setting up the quotas on my network took me all of a couple of hours using Server 2003 R2. I actually pride myself on the uptime of my network, if I don't achieve close to 100% uptime in a term then I'm quite disappointed with myself.

That's very slow. I backup about 350GB to tape in about 10 hours (including verification) for a full backup on a Friday, and do differntial backups for the rest of the week. I'm not sure that NT backup may be your problem, I don't know how well it handles large jobs like this. We use Veritas 11d here, which does the job nicely once you've got it configured correctly. There's also a whole host of other problems it could be from issues with the fibre, to issues with one or other of the servers, disk problems or other tasks getting in the way of the backup running properly. It would be well worth running some experiments like moving the backup server temporarily to a new location to see it it's any quicker, or splitting the backups for different servers into seperate jobs to see if it's just one specific server slowing the thing down, maybe try a different server to back up to, incase it's a problem with the backup server. I'm pretty sure you can get it to work a lot quicker than it is now! Mike.

We have a lot of Dell D510 laptops - Celeron 1.4GHz with 512MB RAM, these are slow but work fine once logged on. Due to replace as many of these as possible this year, with the remainder going to low use areas of the school until they die. Oldest workstations are Dell GX60's which are about 5 yrs old this year, P4 Celereon 2.4GHz with 1GB ram (We upgraded them last year) and also brough flat screens for them to improve them a bit. I think we'll get one more year out of them, maybe 2 if we're lucky. Servers, I have 2 that are 5yrs old+ running Linux for Digital Signage control (Xibo) and FOG for my imaging server. These will stay in use until they die as they are perfectally good for the job. The rest of my servers are under 3 years old. It's what to do with the 120 HP TC1100 tablet PCs that I have stored up that I'm struggling with. These are P3 700MHz with 256MB ram and are absolutely useless as a portable PC, as the batteries on most of them are knackered, and if you put them on a network with XP SP3, forget about it - they're absolutely dog slow. Any suggestions? Mike.

You have to use machine authentication at the pre-login stage - how else would the laptop authenticate its self to the wireless network so it could find the domain controller so the users login details could be validated?

My software restriction policy is disallow everything by default, then allow the entire C:\ and disallow specific programs like regedit, cmd, command.com etc. You also might have to allow the sysvol and netlogon paths so logon scripts can run properly. Mike.

I've only used one once when working on a brand new HP server about 3 years ago.