steveg

Lol, I was told by the smart sales person that that was what they were origionally designed for - capturing stuff written with normal whiteboard pens, the whole projector / interactive bit came later. Steve

For the same spec server you have mentioned we pay about £2131. Speak to a few of the resellers on here, they normally get very similar pricing so can probably beat what you've been quoted. Removing the second cpu takes about £189 off the price. Personally i'd add a second redundant power supply @ aprox £90. Is next day warranty going to be adequate? You might want to consider 4 hour instead? Steve

Seems almost a little over specced to me, (unusual for me, i'm great at over spec'ing servers!) I don't think you'll notice much of a benefit from the second cpu, or from at least 8gig of that ram. - Also check the sql licencing, i'm not an expert but I know some versions are licenced per cpu, so it may not even use the second one. Steve

How big is the school? How many pupils, how many users of sims? Is this going to be just for sims? Does that price included any setup, or is it just the hardware? Steve

Don't smartboard's double as normal whiteboards as well though? Steve

That does seem very low, but it depends on what is included elsewhere, its possible for example that consumables has a a seperate budget, and all computer hardware is leased, and lease costs come from another budget, in which case this money could just be for development. I'm entirely Primary school based, but our budgets vary from £16k for a 180 pupil Infant school, £11k for a 450 Pupil primary, through to go to the head and beg if you want anything new for another school! Steve

When you buy a dell you can select xp downgrade as an option, it then comes with xp installed, with a Vista business recovery cd and licence if you ever want to change to that. Steve

At one of my primary schools each of the classes (14) has 1 good spec desktop and 1 not so good, that could really do with replacing. The good spec ones are having video editing software etc loaded on them, and work great for that, and staff only need 1 pc capable of this in each room. For the older computers, I was thinking of converting them to thin client pc's, but have a number of questions (apologies if these are a bit simple, not deployed any thin clients before!): Will they cope with playing videos / multimedia? - Nothing too big, just things like video clips and flash etc on things like espresso with sound. Will I need aditional software on the server, or can I do it all over terminal services? What advantage is there of using any extra software? What software would be best to run on the clients? How does licencing work for things like word etc, is it 1 copy per thin client, or 1 copy per simultaneous connection? Other than ms software everything else we have is site licences so should be fine. Thanks Steve

I'd turn off any offline folders you have on exisiting clients, and then enable them again once the new drives are mapped to stop them thinking they are always offline. Has caused a few problems for us in the past. Steve

I've used Bulents screen recoder before and found it quite simple. There is a freeware version but I can't find it at the moment. Steve

Between 3 of the schools we support we're looking to purchase just over 60 Acer netbooks and trolleys, as well as a few other bits. If anyone would like to quote please pm me an email address and I will send over the exact details of what we require. Thanks Steve

The only problem I can see is them not coming back on again, its definately the most likely time for them to die! Make sure you have very good backups and a good recovery plan - If their off for 5 weeks I'm guessing its going to be pretty near the start of term before you can switch them back on again? Steve

We've got a pretty quiet summer this year for once (although i'm sure they'll find more for us to do between now and then): Get quotes for, order and setup 67 netbooks Order and install 17 new pc's in IT suite, upgrade ram in existing ones, re-image and deploy to classes Re-image 30 class pc's Document all network points in the school and sort out the mess of a comms cabinet Finish installing the VOIP phone system and wireless network that I started 6 months ago (currently working but could work better!) Tidy the office (prob 2 day job at least!) Sort out garage full of old pc's Few other little bits as well but can't think of much else at the moment. I want to take at least 2 weeks leave as well. Steve

I'd say provided its legal (i.e within planning / building regs) then go for it. Other than some diy skils i'd never done much building work before 3 years ago, when along with my dad and brother we thought we'd have a stab at building a 60 square meter extension. We ended up hiring a brick layer to do some of the birck laying, mainly because we'd still be doing it now if we hadn't, but other than that we did the rest ourselves, and have been living it it for a year now. - It has all been signed off by the building inspector. We learn't a hell of a lot from doing it, and overall it was good fun. It also saved a fortune compared with getting a professional in. Best of luck with the project, just work through it one bit at a time and there's not a lot you can go wrong on really, provided you research it first. Steve

By pour in one go I mean same day basically - as long as you just keep mixing and pouring it will be fine, you just dont want to mix a bit, go and have 2 hour lunch breakthen come and do a bit more. It might be worth seeing how much mixa-mate or one of the similar companies charge - they bring a big machine that mixes the exact ammount you need as you require it. Steve

What are you planning to put in as a floor? Is it going to be a concrete slab? Unless its an extreme slope i'd aim to make the foundations level all over - even if it means that part of it finishes quite a way underground - its fine to build it up in blocks underground and then back fill with soil. With posts on the outside of the corners get some small posts and drive them in until the top of them is level with where you want the top of the foundations to be. If the sides are quite long put one half way down as well - you can level between them with a strait edge and spirit level. When you are sure they are all at the same level its quite easy pouring concrete to the correct height. - Don't forget you really need to do the whole concrete pour in one go. Steve

I'd recon about a foot deep should be ok for the footings - for a single storey house the minimum requirement is 600mm, which is about 2 foot, but as its only a light weight building I wouldnt think you'd need much more than a foot, but it realy does depend on the soil - if you hit something hard early on then you'll be fine, if the ground is really soft then you need to keep digging a bit more. Make sure the bottom of the trench is pretty level - step it if you need to change levels, dont slope it. Put a post on the outside of each corner at the correct level and level to the top of that. they need to be pretty level or you'll find it really hard laying the blocks. If the tool you've ordered is one of those plastic things that you put on top and fill with cement then place the block on top, i really wouldn't bother! Spend a while learning how to lay blocks, after you've completed a couple of courses you will be quicker doing it without the tool! Steve

Still, is there going to be a major noticeable difference between 1gb and 2gb on a p4 3.0ghz pc? I'd say the 512 to 1gb will be a much bigger difference. Steve

I'd agree that they dont look like much of an upgrade for the money, and some extra ram and maybe a clean install would be the way to go. Maybe spend double the money and buy half the number of computers, and take the ram out of the ones you replace to upgrade the ones you have left? Steve

Insight have got the L300-293 for £347 with £50 cashback and a free extra gig of ram - it also has a core 2 T5870. Steve

I wouldn't say its any more exciting than Learning Platform, but we were told to call ours a CLC or connected learning community. Steve

If you fancy building your own pc to do this, the motherboards i've just put in for our new ict suite pc's include 6 sata ports which support raid 5. They are Asus m3n78 pro's, also have gigabit network built in. - a basic pc cost us under £300 each, inc the operating system, so you should be able to build a NAS box and put in 6 1tb hard disks for around £500. Steve

Spec looks about right to me, its very similar to a couple we installed a few months back for similar sized schools and it runs very nicely. As a guide, for a very similar spec'd dell server (slightly slower cpu, but with dual psu's, 6gb of ram and 4 year warranty) we paid a touch under £1800. Steve

We charge our technicians out at aroung £28 per hour for the day to day stuff, and for things like project management or large server installs its around £35 an hour. If you are going to be self employed then these are the sort of rates you should be looking at - you have to factor in the extra time it takes to sort out your tax, invoicing etc. If they are actually going to employ you, then should be a fair bit less, as this comes with a range of benefits. Steve

Yea, we re-installed them with xp pro, just needed to buy an upgrade licence. Steve