maniac

You're in luck, as classlink doesn't fiddle too much with a standard network, all it is basically only a fancy web interface for managing the system with with the actual clients still controlled by group policies - there's no fancy software involved like you get with RM networks as far as I can remember (although it is about 4 years since I've worked with a viglen network) If you're re-imaging all your PCs you won't have any problems anyway, as any potential traces of viglen will be wiped out by the re-imaging process. Mike.

I have a bit of a problem with this on my network at the moment. It prints A4 absolutely fine, but it seems to think Tray 2, which actually has A3 paper in it, has A4. It's set correctly on the copier, but the printer driver still reports it as having A4 paper in. As a result of this whenever you send an A3 document to the printer, it requests you to put paper in the bypass tray, which is a pain in the backside. Anyone got any ideas what I'm doing wrong, I can't find any settings I can actually change on the printer driver to do with this, only on the copier and they all seem to be correct. Cheers, Mike.

BECTAS guidelines state 1 metre per student, but that's near impossible unless you have massive classrooms. I usually go with a measurement of 70cm per student as a minimum. Any closer than this, and there really isn't room to fit the keyboard and mouse in properly. I like the broken horseshoe where by the side desks don't meet up with the bench forming the end of the horse shoe, so you can get PCs all the way along the back wall. This makes most efficient use of the space in my opinion.

We have the cashless system from Uniware, which has been reasonably reliable apart from the fingerprint sensors getting damaged due to greasy fingers, but after some pushing, they have supplied a different and better fingerprint sensor for the tills. We also had a few issues with the cashloaders, but they are all resolved now and were mainly due to a faulty fingerprint sensor, and a software issue. We have the UPAY system implemented which means parents can see exactly what their child is buying from the canteen from the upay website or top up their childs account from home using a debit or credit card, and it's pretty much instant, that's dead handy. The main reason we went for them is they are based in Medway, just a short distance from us which is dead handy for support., and one of our associated schools already had the system and were happy with it. Mike.

I know, but when I rang Microsoft they were very unhelpful and weren't able to supply me with a valid windows XP key to use to enable me to take advantage of the downgrade right under the windows Vista business license, so after getting passed from pillar to post and no one actually being able to answer my query, I gave up and just used the first product key that came to hand. We don't have a Volume license at the school I work at, and I don't want to enter into one either. The only licenses we have are the OEM ones we buy with the machines, so what else was I supposed to use? Microsoft couldn't answer that question. Mike.

I use my little helpdesk, and can't praise it enough. We log absolutely everything through it, even jobs that are called in on the phone, times when people call in the office and ask for equipment for next weeks assembly, everything. That way I can build up a really good picture of how much we've accomplished in a termly, weekly, monthly or even daily basis if I need to. Part of the battle is getting staff to use it, there will be the stubbon 'will nots' and of course there's always supply teachers who can't use it because they're not aware of it, and the problems where by members of staff can't actually access it as whatever problem they've got is affecting network connectivity, but for the most part staff can be persuaded to use it. If you prove it works by make sure you keep a close eye on it, and respond quickly to tickets that require it then they'll start to buy into it slowly when they see a positive response after they've submitted their ticket. We now turn students away at the door who are sent down to us from people we know can use the helpdesk, and slowly they get the message and less and less of this happens, which allows us to manage our workload much more effectively and prioritise jobs properly. A proper helpdesk is definitely the way forwards for this sort of thing.

I've managed to use an OEM XP key that I randomly took from a Dell system case to image 30 PCs with that had Vista Business licenses, and Activated it 30 times as well. So far no one from Microsoft has been banging down the door. I was surprised I was able to activate it that many times, but it worked fine! Mike.

I've been infomed, from a big software distributor who are an MS gold partner, that providing there is an OEM sticker on the system case, you can use any product key you like to install the OS with, it doesn't necessarily have to match the license key on the case as long as the installed OS is the same as the one licensed by the sticker. I only found this out after enquiring if we were to buy just a small number of XP licenses, and thus qualifying for a VLK could I use this VLK on other machines not covered by the agreement, providing they have an OEM sticker on the case. The agent went away and enquired, and came back to me stating that it was perfectly acceptable to do this. Unfortunitely I can't find the e-mail, despite just spending a good 15 mins searching my inbox, but I will make the same enquiry again and see if the response is the same. This makes sense because if you do a system restore using the Dell supplied media on a Dell computer for instance it installs windows using the same product key for every machine - but this product key only works on Dell machines, try installing it on another manufactures machine and it doesn't work. This product key behaves like a VLK and requires no activation, and there's no option to enter the product key on the actual system case at any point in the setup process - it's entirely automated. The same thing applies to a set of HP laptops we have, product key is pre-programmed into the restore CD. Mike.

I think it would be possible to write a VB script which looked at the machine name and altered the appropriate registry settings accordingly. I've not got time to do it, but I'm pretty certain it's achievable. Mike.

I've often wondered, does anyone have any screen shots of the original PHPBB based forum that edugeek used to be? The archived page on the waybackmachine doesn't load, because (understandably) none of the graphics exist anymore! Mike

If your usernames meet the required pattern, you can use my easy password reset tool - there's no setting up to do, just needs .NET installed and the 'account manager' priviledge to be allocated to the user in Active Directory. (Unfortunitely development has ground to a hault on account of the fact I managed to loose the source code!) http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23952-easy-password-reset-software.html Mike.

If I use my car for an authorised journey in connection with work, then I'm covered on the schools insurance policy for the duration of that journey, so if I had an accident, my own insurance would be un-affected - I'm pretty sure most schools have a simelar policy, but some probably chose to keep quiet about it! Mike.

Thank you for those responses, that's given me a few companies to call and a few ideas to think about. As I said it's all new to me, but I'm keen to make it work as I think it's important to have different technologies available to use in schools. Mike.

Some JVC camcorders record in a weird format, but as you said if you rename the files to .AVI they open fine in media player. Mike

Oh dear! I think you've illustrated why it's a bad idea to have server rooms on the ground floor - or if you have no choise, why the servers should be raised up off the floor. Best of luck sorting that lot out, it'll be weeks before they'll open the school again I should think, all the health and safety checks that have to be done after flooding has taken place take a while! Mike.

We're looking at the real possibility of allowing students to use their own laptops and other wireless devices in school, as well as allowing visitors and teachers from other schools to have internet access through our wireless system without the faff that it is at the moment. I've found a product called Bwireless being marketed by ITS that offers a nice easy way to do this BWireless, Wi-Fi hotspot solution, managing a system of hotspots, ideal for schools, colleges and universities and I have a estimate on the way for the cost to implement this type of system. What I'm after is other systems which offer the same sort of service for comparison purposes, but so far I've drawn a bit of a blank when searching, can anyone reccommend any to me? Cheers, Mike.

I had simelar problems using fedora when I first tried setting Fog up. I switched to using Ubuntu to host it on intead and it installed first time on there. Mike.

I still have none of these problems on my installation of Eclipse.Net, the speed is absolutely fine no matter what client I access it from. We have machines ranging from Pentium 4 2.4GHz up to Core2Duo based machines and they all load it very quickly. The server its hosted on is an older Xenon based server, it has 4GB ram running server 2003, and it also hosts some of our printers, some student home areas as well as our intranet and ICT helpdesk with no real problems. The database is Microsoft SQL server express edition. Personally I really like Eclipse.net and so does our Learning Resource centre manager who uses all day everyday. Mike.

Please can someone recommend me a basic mac server (or just a company to call for advice) which will support 30 or so workstations. I know very little about macs, but we want to integrate our current suite of 15 macs that are used for music into our active directory domain, so we can use them more for normal workdprocessing and internet access etc. and we want the server to be able to support more mac workstations in the future as it's likely we will buy some for art/photography at some point in the future. I know to make the best of this we really need a mac server to control them properly, but I'm totally lost when it comes to chosing a company to supply us, or what hardware to go for etc. so if someone can point me in the right direction, that'd be great! Many thanks, Mike.

Will be interesting. The first school I worked in used SIMS and I had to deal with the nightmare that was migration to .NET. The next school I worked in had Sercos CMIS/E-Portal which I thought was brillient - web interface for registration and reporting, easy to setup external accessibility for parents/carers and students and extreemly flexible. It had its flaws but was streets ahead of SIMS. It was almost like stepping back in time coming here and going back to SIMS again, and seeing that it really hadn't moved on that much in the 2 years that I'd been away from it! It's about time they considered updating their old model of having to run client software on every workstation that connects to it. Bromcom is another system that has been using a web based interface for a long time as well. That was no where near as good as E-Portal, but was still quite well written and did what it needed to do. do any schools use Bromcom, as it very rarely gets a mention here. Mike.

Not to mention the not so skillfully woven in plug for Dell in the middle of the article Edit: Sysman_mk, you beat me to it. lol

Duel output video cards are so cheap now thou, I personally think that's a better option instead of using a splitter. We have several of each in this school, and the ones run through the splitters are always a lower quality image than the ones run from duel output video cards. Mike.

Have you been talking to my academy head, as that's almost word for word what he said to me about 2 months ago, and I agree which is why we're looking at ways to open up our network to allow students to use their own devices, and more sustainable ways of using desktiop PC in the school etc.

We used to have one laptop per child here, which we changed last year because it was a logistical nightmare. Students wen't allowed to take them home, instead we had a 'laptop room' where they all lived in secure storage cabinets. Each laptop was numbered and allocated to a student. All the students had to do was pick them up at the beginning of school from this room, then take them back at lunch time, pick them up after lunch then take them back at the end of school. To cut a long story short it didn't work, we kept finding them dumped in various places around the building, the students claiming that 'someone else must have taken it out of the cabinet' students never remembered to put them on charge, so we spent literally hours a week just plugging in laptops and we had 2 that got stolen - although we never really found where they went as the students involved claimed that they were taken from the cabinet room by someone else, and there lies the problem - unless you can make the system fully accountable, they do have a tendancy to go walkabouts in my experience, and we spent hours a week just counting laptops and making sure they were all there. We contemplated for a while storing them in form rooms, but then changed angle completely and we have now divided up the laptops we had, and put some in each department so they are available for any student to use. We find this works much better, and the staff like it better as well as they can make sure that the laptops will be ready to be used for their lesson because they are kept in their rooms, so there's no issues of students fogetting to pick up their laptop, or not having charged it up etc. 1 laptop per child is a nice idea, but in this school it just didn't work. Mike.

Does anyone else have the problem of newer laptops supporting such high resolutions, and weird wide screen resolutions that it's impossible to get some projectors to display the images correctly without haveing to go through the lengthy procedure of; a) Explaining to the teacher why the screen on their laptop looks out of focus if you run it in a lower then optimum resolution so the projector works. b) Explaining to the teacher how to change the resolution back and forwards for when they are and are not using the projector. c) Dealing with the influx of support calls by those who can't understand either of the two above points. Apart fro changing the projectors for better ones (not possible) or buying laptops that support maximum of 1024x768 4:3 resolution (everything is better than that now) what else can we do to make this work more efficiently? Mike.