steveg

Dont think it mentions which version it is, but i'm assuming as its pre-installed there shouldn't be any problems with it. For what they'll be using it for 32 or 64bit versions will both serve them fine. Steve

Been asked by one of the teachers to recomend a laptop for home use, ideally Windows 7 based. Budget is around £350 ish. Best i've found so far is this Toshiba SATELLITE L450D-11W review cheap prices SATELLITE L450D-11W Toshiba best buy discount online uk shop Which is "Toshiba's Satellite L450D-11W, powered by the AMD Athlon™ X2 Dual-Core QL-64 processor, is preloaded with the Windows® 7 Home Premium operating system. It has a 320GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM. With a 15.6" high definition display, the Satellite L450D-11W also has a DVD Rewriter and a powerful ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card." for £366 Is there anything better at the moment for that sort of price? Steve

We use usb hard disks for our backups, 1 500gig and 1 250gig per day is enough for us. We have a week's set of each, and then 4 which we swap with the Wednesday disks to give us up to a month we can go back. We store all of these on site in a 2 hours data fire proof safe at the oposite end of the building to the servers. Because each drive is only being used once a week, they all seem to have lasted fine (only 1 failure since we switched to hard disks over 3 years ago) We also use a cheap 1gb NAS that has the sims and FMS databases encypted and copied to it 3 times a day during a normal day, so in theory we should never loose more than 3 hours of sims data, or 1 day of anything else. Steve

Great, thanks for that, so I guess the only option if we want the computer a reasonable distance away is to just use a long VGA cable? Can the connection panel be mounted on either side of the board? Steve

Has anyone got one of the i series smart boards (integrated projector) and could let me know where the connections (vga in, usb etc are on it) I need to source and install 7 of these, and convert another 4 normal smarts to have the same projector next year, and am starting to plan the project now. I just needed to check how the connections are made - is the vga port on the side of the board, or is it run from the projector to a wall box like a normal install? If so what length leads do they come with? Thanks Steve

Nov 19th, 13:22

So you already have a working network server, and just want one for running as a games server? The best bet would be to buy a cheap server, or even a pc with 2-4gb of ram in, install server 2003/8 on it and set it up as a member server. (server operating system, and part of the domain, but not a domin controller) Then use this to just run the games. Steve

Trying not to be too negative here, but i think this may have been superseeded now by systems such as homecontact, where schools can email and txt parents. These are becoming more and more popular for use for newsletters and general reminders, so I think most schools would just send a txt out via this system. If you wanted your site to be able to send txt's to parents, then you are going to have to charge for it somewhere, as you will need to pay to send txt's, and I can't see many schools wanting to subscribe to another service. Steve

Only problem I can see is it duplicates what is already done. We already have to inform 2 local radio stations, the LEA who have a list on thier website, and update our own website if there is a closure, and parents all know to look in these places. Steve

We've recently had a brand new wireless link put in, at a stunning speed of..... 2mbit! Yay! To download a 3 - 4 gig file, its actually quicker to walk home, download it and bring it back, and i've only got sky broadband at home! Steve

Try and get a Dell premier account setup, then you can go online and get the best possible pricing - the prices we get on ours for even 1 unit cannot be matched by one of the account managers if I ring up and tell them i'm ordering 100! All ordering is done online on credit account, makes it all really simple. Steve

We started off buying the Geenevision ones, but they haven't lasted brilliantly, and we werent that impressed, so now buy the avermedia ones, and have to say all the staff love them. We started off with enough for half the classes, but they were in such high demand that we had to buy enough to have 1 for each class! I would say they have been one of the few bits of technology that the staff themselves has pushed us to get more, rather than the usual having to persuade staff of the benefits and it slowly be adopted. We also lent one to 2 of the schools we suport, after a term's trial both schools now have 1 in every class room as well! Yes, they aren't much more than a good webcam on a stick, but they are worth the extra money for the fact they just work - press 1 button and you can show someones bit of work, or model or whatever to the whole class, press it again and you're back to your iwb. Steve

How about something like this Steatite Embedded - Previously ICP (Industrial Computer Products) - Compact industrial 1U rack-mount PC with Mobile Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz CPU More pc than server, but should be up to the job? They've got a few other specs on there as well, all 230mm deep. Steve

We've just got an Acti 1231 camera and have been pretty impressed with it. It comes with some software that should do what you want, although I haven't actually tried the software, as we're using it for time lapse recording, so use a different app. It produces up to 1280 x 1024 res images, so pretty clear, supports POE, and wasn't a bad price. Steve

That image is filtered here, what is the error you are getting? Steve

I haven't used them personally, just saw the ad on their website, but the new Acer Aspire Timeline appears to offer an 8 hour battery life, and seems quite reasonably priced. Its on the first page at Home at the moment if you want to have a look. Steve

Do you have any form of router between the 2 networks?

You could use the shutdown command as part of a login script, set to log the pc off after xx minutes. It will then start its countdown as soon as they logon, so they can see how long they have left. Steve

If you did just want a single access point, if this is the only place that is going to need wireless coverage, then i'd go with something like a netgear WG302, i've used these in a couple of schools and they are very reliable. If you you need coverage for an area that 1 or 2 access points wouldn't cover, or are going to have more than about 5 wireless clients, then you really should look at a managed solution as mentioned above. Steve

I've got that same controller in one of my schools, and they have recently started using 30 netbooks in 1 class, with 2 access points in there, and it works perfectly, it also controls another 6 access points around the school. Its not the simplest wireless controller in the world to setup, but if your having it installed this shouldn't be much of an issue. It might be worth looking into the ruckus kit, as everyone on here seems to rate it pretty highly - I will certainly trial it at the next school that needs a wireless solution. Steve

We've had lots to do with them over the years, and have had around £30k from them in grants as well. Steve

Have you tried switching it off and on again? :-) Steve

Don't forget that all ghz's aren't equal, so a 2.4ghz i7 may be as quick / quicker than a 3ghz core 2, you will need to look at benchmarks that reflect what you will be doing with it. As for 2 vs 4 cores, in the long term, 4 is always going to be best. At the moment there is still not a huge ammount of multi-threaded software around that can make use of multiple cores, although this is increasing all the time. Steve

You just need to grant yourself permission to that registry key first - you'll need to take ownership first, then add yourself as having full control and it works fine. Just tested it on my laptop. Steve

Isn't the smart 685 a widescreen 16:10 aspect ratio board? I dont think the projector you've mentioned is a widesceen one. Steve