maniac

We have a one lan net-top-box, and I'd say there are better products out there. Sure it does what it says, but I find the interface confusing, and for the money it's quite restrictive really. Having said that, once you've figured it out, it does work OK, just expensive for what it is IMO. Once you've brought one thou, you can use items like these; http://www.cabletime.com/introduction_to_mediastar_evolution.asp to distribute the signal round your school over your IP network. Mike.

let my hair grow for nearly 2 years, then I had a job interview and thought it was better to tidy it up a bit, so I know how ya feel! Problem was I never realised exactly how much my hair had receeded during that 2 years!! Ah well, it was fun dying it silly colours while it was long, I made a fantastic count drakula at Haloween 2006, no wig required! Mike.

Sounds like the stage at my previous school! I'm not joking either when I say there was only 1 single 13a socket available by the stage. Regulalry it ran a high powered PA system, CD player, digital piano, mixing desk, amps, some lighting bits, smoke machine and other items. They only changed this after one of the governors expressed his concern after attending a performance where the electrics tripped halfway through. Silly thing is all they did was expand this 1 socket into 4, which was still on the same ring main and still regulalry tripped! And because they were all in one place, they still used miles of extension cords!

I was told the main reason you shouldn't daisy chain extension cords was because for each plug socket the current passes through in a circuit, there is a certain amount of resistance placed in the circuit. Therefore too many chained together could introduce too much resistance into a circuit, affect the items plugged into it and also generate heat. Also use of the coiled up ones while still coiled is very dangerous if you overload them, as it will melt the cable and the fuse only blows when it's almost too late. Yes I've done it, yes I felt silly, but it goes to show how a momentory lapse of concentration almost led to disaster with extension cords. It was smoking away quite nicely when I discovered it, good job I was around as I'm sure it wasn't far from actually catching light when I caught it! Saying that, several aeas of my house have extension leads plugged into extension leads, and I know of a lot of areas in the school were this is the case, particularly when they use the laptop trollys and run extension leads round the classrooms to keep them going when they've previously not been charged! We keep advising against it, but it still happens no matter what we say. As for the legalities of it, I seriously doubt that it is actually illegal, if it was I'm sure we would be aware of it. It is definitely not adviseable, and it dead against the advise issued in leaflets included with any extension lead. Mike.

I've just now donated £20 to the fund. I know it's not much, but I'm sure it will be used wisely. Mike.

Insted of calling it from a script, if you program it to be directly run as a logon script its self within group policy, it will work. Put in; \\nelson\Netlogon\BGinfo.exe as the file name and \\nelson\Netlogon\bginfo\logon.bgi /timer:0 in the box marked perameters. This is how I had mine setup, although we stopped using it now as it caused us a few problems. (nothing technical, but we found if the students knew the machine names, a few of them were exploiting the messaging functions, so we turned off BGinfo and re-named our machines, we do use the messageing functions legitimately, so we didn't want to loose them!) Mike.

One film I always try and show to people is a film called return to paradise (1998). (Don't confuse with 1953 film of same name!) It was released in theatres over here, but wasn't marketed or pushed by the film company, so it got overlooked by a lot of people. In my opinion it's well made and very under-rated. Definitely worth a watch. Mike.

Ahhh, keep getting them wrong! All a little before my time, although every now and then one pops up that I know! lol Mike.

How big is too big?? We have lots of mailboxes which are several gigabytes, they're all SLT members so difficult to tell them to slim down a bit! Mike.

That's precisely the reason why unless there's a really good reason not to, I develop everything I do in PHP (or ASP ocassionally) with bits of JAVA code for more advanced features on the pages. With a bit of time spent, pratically any type of application can be web-based these days, which makes it a whole lt easier if you make changes to it or change peoples workstations, no re-deployment to worry about! For non-web based applications I tend to use VB.NET as it's very easy to learn and surprisingly flexible, and best of all it's free! Only problem I found out recently is for some reason you can't run a .NET application from a network share. Mike.

I think the most important thing with any thread is keep it on topic! If someone asks a question, then answer the question and try and keep any comments relevant. I refer to a recent thread which decended into a completely off topic slagging match, and was eventually locked thankfully. I'm in full support of the way the admin team are trying to keep up standards on this site, I think its important to have a set of rules for the forum, and to uphold these where necessary otherwise it all gets out of control. I've been members of forums where the mods have failed to keep in control, and the forum has ended up a complete mess, become very volatile and members started moving away in droves. Equally so I've been members of over moderated forums where almost everything posted was moderated in some way. This has a simelar effect. Edugeek admin team and moderators get it right most of the time, hats off to you all! Mike.

Ahh, just thought. if it's a web link, then the extension is .url not .lnk. Mike.

Are you running the copy command from a command prompt window or by typing it in the 'run' box. Normally I'd expect an error in the command line box, not a windows error like you're getting. Mike.

Try changing it to the C:\ root to test it, and try a different location to copy from, or try it just copying a file locally until you find the bit that causing you problems. Mike.

I've cleared some of my stuff out of my parents loft today, and amongst it all was a box of old mainly microsoft software, all origenal 3.5" disks. Seems a shame to just throw it all out, but I've got absolutely no use for it so if anyone fancies seeing what word version 2.0 looks like, or wants an official copy of windows 3.0 then let me know! I've got the following, (All are proper origenal disks) MS-DOS 5 (2 copies) Visual Basic 3 Professional Powerpoint Version 3.0 Project Version 3.0 Excel Version 4.0 (2 copies) Word Version 2.0 (3 Copies) Access Version 2.0 Access Version 1.1 MS works for DOS (Version 3) Windows Version 3.0 Windows Version 3.1 Micrografx Draw Version 3.0 These are all official origenal Microsoft disks, I got them in a job lot brought at a clearance auction about 12 years ago. Seems a shame to throw them away, but they are completely useless to me so if anyone can make use of them, you are welcome to them for the cost of the postage. I can't garuntee that all the disks work, they are up to 15 years old and have been in a loft for at least the last 6 or 7 years. I tried a couple on my machine and they read OK, but there's over 100 discs, so can't possibly test them all! Mike. P.S I'm not splitting them, all or nothing if you want them!

I thought for a moment that copy may not work from unc paths, but just logged into work to try it, and it does. Has the user running the script got write access to the 'all users' area? Check the permissions on the actual shortcut as well. Just tried this copying from my sysvol share at work to a local c:\ folder, and it worked fine for me. Mike.

Put speech marks round the "\\fn.local\ . . . . " part as well as the destination. Reason for this, because it has spaces in it, my example didn't so I didn't type them. Mike.

I code all my systems in PHP simply because they are then webbased and don't require any additional componants to be on the client computer, so they are non dependant on what the client is running. Also linking to a mySQL or MSSQL database with PHP is easy, and it's easy to write simple authentication into the system to keep people out that shouldn't be using it. If I were doing it, I'd definitley opt for PHP. Mike.

if it's just a single shortcut, just use the normal windows copy command, i.e. something like; copy \\servername\sharename\folder\shortcut.lnk "c:\documents and settings\%username%\start menu\programs\" Mike.

Mr FN-Greatermanchester sir, you need to learn to use google Bung robocopy into google, first result is a detailed wikipedia article telling you where to get it, and how to use it! Mike,

No problem, made the same mistake myself when setting up our exchange server! Mike.

Have you turned on 'forms authentication' in Exchange?? This should make the web based logon page the default. see mine at https://www.nbc.medway.sch.uk/exchange If you look at the URL it's a totally diffeent construction to yours, so chances are unless forms authentication is switched on, the logon form won't actually work. See following article for more information; http://www.petri.co.il/configuring_forms_based_authentication_in_exchange_2003.htm Mike

Ok, got that wrong! sorry, my limited elecrical knowledge coming out there, although that means my parents box is wired wrong as their sockets are all on the side of the box that's not protected by the RCD. Might get that looked into! Mike.

The signals on those can travel through normal circuit breakers, but as far as I remember, not RCD devices. Most common household fuseboxes use only normal circuit breakers, (although to complicate matters there is normally an RCD splitting the box in half that's used to protect circuits such as cookers and electric showers.) However most ring mains are run on the part of the box before this RCD, so therefore it should be able to work across different ringmains. If you have a circa 1960's fusebox like my ancient inneedofsomeinvestment house does, then you won't have a problem either. Blimy, that's a mouthful of text to make a simple point! Mike.

I have almost that exact quote printed out in my office wall! The amount of swearing in our office annoys me, particularly given we work in a school. I usually only swear when I'm on my own at myself if I make a balls up, or when I'm at home with my housemates, else I try and keep it to a minimum. It really is un-necessary in most contexts, and for expressing frustration there's hundreds of other words to choose from! Just my opinion. Mike.