Achandler

We get them cheap from the Audio Visual company we buy our projectors off, they are usually second ofcourse from projectors that they have scrapped but thats fine for me.

Im sorry but the ring light is the best part, nothing like walking down a dark corridor with UFO shapes glowing above your head! Yes we use them and they are perfect for what we need as a secondary school.

We use them as do several other schools in our area. In the past 10 months we have had Internet issues once for about 6 hours and that was just before Christmas, they tweeted updates about the problem. We are local to one of the data centres of the parent/ sister company and although i haven't been myself, it is meant to be a good place to visit. We also have ADSL failover from them. In fact as a group of schools in the area we were partly responsible for them sponsoring an Edugeek forum because we opened there eyes to a new market. If you want any further information then just PM me, I still have all the prices etc from multiple companies that we got quotes about a year ago.

Flashing lights on Toshibas actually mean there is a short somehwere, usually the mainboard ofcourse. Use to flash 3 times on L300s, I've worked fixing them. usually it means your stuffed if just using a different battery or power adpater doesnt work.

What booking system does he want? I assumed everything would break and it pretty much did, if you update the core files on the install it tried to update and then does checks on all the plugins one by one. This is where I got my list ofthings that wouldn't work but it also provided me a lsit of things I would need to find upgraded or alternatives to, an example of this is our helpdesk we use. I know you have limited testing resources where you are, but I would do the following A completely fresh version of whichever version you are currently using (e.g 1.9.14) on a second server/ desktop and host it on moodle2.yourschool.org.uk (Test) Then do an SQL dump from your live working Moodle and copy your moodle and moodledata folder from the live install. Then replace the moodle and moodledata folder of your test Moodle with the copies you made. You should now have a test Moodle with the correct plugins installed, correct moodledata but all your courses and marks won't be there Now replace your test database with your SQl dump from your live database You should now have an exact copy of your moodle install but hosted on a different URL, check you can login You can then upgrade the test site to Moodle 2.0 and see what breaks, and if it all breaks then it isn't a problem as it is just a test site. Get to Moodle 2.0.5, then worry about upgrading further. I don't know who installed your Moodle originally but it might not have that many plugins that will break in it, msot of ours that broke werent used. As for the being on Microsoft and not Ubuntu, it should be irrelevant, the process should be very similar if not identical. You will of course face the same problem I did that you need teaching staff to check that their own courses and grades are there on the test site, you can't do all that yourself and you do not know what is meant to be there to start with.

Witch, i have done this (as a trial) for ours but we went from version 1.9 to 2.2 on Ubuntu. I wrote a mini guide for myself on how I did it. I did this 4 times to get the best way. My first attempt was to find out exactly what would break (i.e blocks and plugins). i'll attach an exact copy of the file 9red highlights were the really important plugins to me). Obviosuly it is specific to me and my school with the unsupported plugins list etc. Moodle Upgrade Guide.docx I used 2 boxes initially to do this, and it took me a few hours to work out everythign that would happen. You also CANNOT go from 1.9 to 2.2 you need to go through the intermediate steps or it breaks. I used a backed up database, a copy of the moodledata folder and the config.php As for loss of data, I lost no data that I know of. The data stored for plugins that no longer worked is still there throughout the whole process and when I reinstalled some of the plugins i could get for version 2.2, it picked up all my old data and it was like nothign had changed. the biggest problem I can see you having is that a lot of plugins simply will not work with the new version.

A lot of projectors now come with atleast 3 year warranty on both projector and bulb, all education Hitachis do as far as I am aware. Try to get projectors that are going to be around for a few years though, as in you can still buy the model in a few years. Nothing better then having a lot of the same projector in the school, then in makes sense to keep some spare "stock" parts. Having every room with different makes and models makes your job impossible.

indeed mats, in our situation though, we enforce that memory sticks must be encrypted, so you cannot save to an unencrypted memory stick in the school only read from it. Truecrypt couldnt do this. We encrypt laptops with truecrypt though.

Bitlocker to Go is great if everyone has Windows 7, we have had some staff compalin that they can't save to their encrypted drives because they only have Vista or even XP. We still enforced it though.

I suspect that on the first run of the Notebook software it tries to register some regkeys or similar, doing a process that only an administrator has rights to do, but is only required once. I am assuming this because I am guessing teachers have no admin rights. The problerm with SMART Notebook is that it seems to never work properly when deployed when used it an image etc, we have put in in an image before and the autostart of the smart tools broke. Then there is the SMART Notebook Printer to convert to notebook files, only works reliably if your an administrator and you installed it. Sadly my advice would be to login every computer once and run it.

Try the universal driver, if your luck it will work, but I can assume you that a print server that is 64bit will take the 32bit drivers from HP. I have just checked and I have 32bit and 64bit drivers installed for a HP Laserjet P4010 and the universal driver (PCL 5 and PCL 5.1). 1) My advice would be unistall the printer, and remove the drivers from the drivers section in Print Management. 2) Resrart the server (if you can) 3) Download the drivers you require again 32bit and 64bit 4) Extract the drivers to a location on your server e.g. C:\Drivers\HP\, then have a 32Bit and 64Bit subfolder 5) Open Print Management again, and open the Drivers section 6) Add the Drivers again, checking both the 32bit and 64bit box, when it asks for a location choose the 64bit driver location. 7) The Server will add a 64bit and error saying no 32bit driver exists, so now point it to the 32bit driver location, it should now have both. 8) Install your printer and choose the correct driver (from the list) and check both boxes again, the printer should install correctly. If your driver will not work then the HP Universal driver definitely installs both 32bit and 64bit so try that.

A lot of drivers you can easily install straight onto the server, just install it as 64bit and go back to add the 32bit version using the tickboxes. There has only even been one printer that I needed to use the workaround method to install the driver for.

Wildcard SSl certifcates are for a similar variable *.domain.org.uk Therefore you can use it to secure multiple sites, we use our for the terminal server, the webmail etc.

E-Mail and access to it should be done strictly on a per school basis, some schools simply don't have good enough students for it, whereas most just have a few that can't be trusted. Our students have access and they are generally very well behaved on it, but i can see how it would be impossible to effectively manage if you have hundreds and students abusing it.

You need a normal SSL certificate. You publish the gateway and it is this that people connect to externally, for example to https://gateway.myschool.org.uk, this just needs to have a standard SSL certificate because it is using port 443. We use a wildcard here for all our secure sites including external connections to ur gateway.

Maybe I can, what bits do you actually need the whole tray? We are looking at getting rid of an old Smartboard soon and it is a black border.

I've used OpenDNS at a charity and it is free and its good and its scary what people look at in the middle of the night!

different computer, with different cable and different splitter. Still the same problem give Hitachia ring, they are usually very good with Educational institutions, I would try to get a new one though, not a repair. I would class this as Dead on Arrival really.

I suspect I know one of the schools you have applied to and got the interview at, its right near where I live (judging by your own location). If it is the said school, then firstly I went there, though it was about 9 years ago now when I left and I have heard the IT there is very very target driven, the school had no proper infrastructure when i was there and when I last visited (2 years ago) not all rooms have computers in, so staff must have laptops. I know a lot of the staff to, in fact I know people who still go to the school now. If you want to know what the school was like then feel free to pm me, I'll even ask my friend whose brother goes there to ask him about what the IT is like if I can. I would expect the students to be better there then a state school but they are by no means angels! Even I remember hiding the mouseballs and changing keyboard keys round etc when i was at school but maybe that was just me and my friends!

Agreed get a sponge or cloth (DRY) and wipe the sensor.

If you have 6/7 servers, then why not use some of them as your hosts to, they cannot all be end of life, if your installing Exchange 2010 on one they can't be to bad. They could be the "failover" boxes. From experience, a seperate DC is necessary, whether it is one stored on the local drive on a server, or a different physical box, you need 1 DC to come online before a failover cluster (in a HyperV environment)will come online. As for your switches, I am assuming you mean connecting your SAN and servers. You can use any "decent" switch but think about 10GBe SANs etc depending on your budget. If you are buying new servers, then work out how many cores you are using already, work out how much RAM you are using. Then you need to have more then that, remember for Virtual Cores, a thread is a core so a Quad Core with 8 threads is 8 Virtual Processors, so you can get 16 Virtual Cores from a 8 core Intel Server etc. If you are only buying two servers and expect failover then each of those 2 servers much be able to run alll your needed services, otherwise you have no failover at all. This is why I suggested using your old servers as hosts to.

When you create the image are you generalising it?

Cover and cover supervisors would be another issue that would crop up, but a minor one if the school was already considered to be breaking the strike. The cover rule also does not apply to all schools, as some schools (independent) have chosen to ignore it after consultation with teaching staff. Most cases are unique, but it is something I wouldn't like to get mixed up in, as breaking a strike is not a good idea.

But those resources are only free by closing the school to other students. I don't make up the law but this is how it is explained as best as possible. If you have teacher A (not striking) and B (striking), both teaching a class of 30 students, Class A and Class B. You cannot tell Class A don't come to school because of the strike and then use Teacher A to teach Class B. Because Teacher A isnt doing their job and Class A aren't at school because Teacher B (not their own teacher) has walked out. If Teacher A has no class then they could be used to supervise Class B because they would not be not teaching their own class (if that makes sense!)

Dr Cheese employment law states "..an employment business may not supply a temporary worker to a hirer to replace an individual taking part in an official strike or any other official industrial dispute. In addition, an employment business must not introduce or supply a work-seeker to do the work of someone who has been transferred by the hirer to perform the duties of the person on strike or taking industrial action." The government would be redeploying workers from another department, telling some students they can't come in because they are no teachers but then using those students teachers to teach others is the same as "re-hiring" opening the school to every student using the staff who will work is acceptable but not picking and choosing.