steveg

We've used loads of these with a variety of laptops with no problems at all. Sumvision Note book Power Adapter *** 90W*** - Ebuyer At £11 they are a lot cheaper than the origional ones! They do higher wattage ones as well if you need more power. Steve

Nothing to do with me, just saw the advert, so if anyone's interested: www.varndean.co.uk - ICT Director Steve

Lapbank do one where you put 2 per shelf. I think it was about £700 for one that will take 16 netbooks. Use their own ac adaptors. Which one did you find? We will be buying one soon! Steve

Maybe I shouldn't moan so much about not having enough time then! We do always seem to be busy though! I will often work a 45 hour week just to get things done! (I have just had a month off though :-)) We do have to support quite a bit at the main site, but nothing too excessive: 5 servers, inc exchange, sql and remote access 80 desktop clients 120 wireless clients, inc 100 of which the kids take home HP managed wireless network with 14 access points VOIP phone system Recently setup a data logger and cctv system to monitor the school pond Currently developing the schools VLE We also do all network cabling, whiteboard and projector installs, PAT testing and other maintenance in house. A very supportive head and school business manager is very useful! Steve

I'm a full time ICT manager at a large(ish) primary (420 kids). I also have 1 full time term time only technician, and another for 2 days a week. They are mainly used to support another 6 primary schools that we support though. In total at the main school we work at, between us we are there for 60 hours a week. We've been able to fund this level of cover from the profit we make charging the technicians out to the other schools. Steve

With your current setup, you can't. You will need a pbx - essentially a small internal phone exchange for this to work, each phone would then be a seperate extension, and therefore have its own internal number. However for just 2 phones this wont be a very cost effective solution. Steve

Just a couple of suggestions - i'd keep the security settings the same, and change the ssid on one ap and half the laptops, otherwise it will still attempt to connect to either access point, but will fail as the security details will be wrong. Also when dividing the laptops out, i'd do odds and evens, so that if just use the first 12 laptops are used, you still benefit from double the bandwidth. Steve

We upgraded ours a couple of months ago from an old panasonic analogue system. We decided it was something we could do in house, and after a lot of hunting around went for a system from Epygi with snom ip phones. Total cost of the phone system, and 12 handsets was under £1500. It currently runs over an ISDN 2 line, but has the capability to support voip. All of the handsets are true ip, which we needed as a lot of our buildings are connected via fiber. Although i'd never heard of the company before, their support has been good, and their product range seems to be really good. It also seems to be pretty flexible - i've manged to set my nokia n95 up as a voip extension over the wireless network with no problems. Steve

Its the optiplex 755 usff that you want, then one of the monitor options in an all in one design, that has fixings to attach the pc to the back. Steve

How high is really high? I've installed one in a hall that had a height of about 5m to the top of the pitch inside, and it wasnt really a problem. I did turn down a job where it was a 7.5m ceiling though. You can get 3m poles as standard, so provided the roof isn't over 3m above the top of where you want the screen if should be ok. Obvoiusly its going to be a long cable run, so good quality cables are important. I'm not sure if they have made any very bright ones yet, but might be worth lookng at an ultra close range projector -we've just had one installed in a suite, and to get an image big enough for a smartboard it has to be just 42cm from the wall - If you could boom mount one you could easily get a large image. Just an idea, not sure if it would work! Steve

If you do want to try and go down the cable route, then def worth speaking to BT, as you can rent pairs of copper off of them connected to both buildings. Main disadvantage of this is the length of copper is from building 1 to phone exchange back to building 2 - so if the exchange is 2 miles away, you're never going to get much accross it. Can't remember what the service was called, or if they still offer it - last time i did this was about 6 years ago, but it worked out at something like £350 per year for the lines, and the install wasn't hugely expensive. You just put your own sdsl routers at each end. I'm pretty sure they do the same thing with fiber as well, but no idea of the costs, and if you haven't already got bt fiber into both buildings, its gonna be expensive! If not, are the tree's on the schools land, or somewhere else? I it feasable to loose a few of them? We've round trees really kill a wireless signal - obvoius question is does it improve in a month or so's time when they loose their leaves? Steve

Are these worth going to? I've worked here 5 years now and haven't been to one yet! Steve

We've got 2 lapsafe's, 2 lapbank's and 2 ones I made myself out of mdf! The lapsafe's are good, but after 5 years of heavy usage, our oldest one is begining to pack up - a lot of the charging leads are starting to break. The lapbank's are very sturdy, and if you get any problems with a charger it can easily be replaced. Steve

Never used this company before, but a quick google brought up this 5m one: kenable - for cables, networking and peripherals or a 10m one: Power Cord UK Plug to Figure 8 Lead Cable 10m [ Fig8-10m ] - kenable - for cables, networking and peripherals Steve

I've got a toshiba tecra somthing or other laptop, - core 2 2.6ghz and 2gig ram. Highest spec machine I could find about 4 months ago when they said I could have a new laptop! Also got a work phone - nokia n95 which lets me connect to the new voip phone system via wifi, and make internal calls while in the school. Up until about 6 months ago was running a 5 year old acer that took a lifetime to boot up. Also got a couple of cheap new hp servers for testing and development. Steve

Had this exact same problem today, as I finally got round to installing ours. All the ones connected to the main switch worked, all the others didn't. Added a DNS entry called PROCURVE-WESM pointing to the ip of the WESM and all was fine. This is the default name any new radio port will look for. In theory on the same network they should be able to find it at layer 2 without the need for dns, but ours didn't, and as this worked I didn't bother investigating further. Steve

I'd probably say wait until you can get some more then, if they work well. It can be quite hit and miss with the cheaper points, so if you've got a hit, i'd stick with it! Where abouts in East Sussex are you btw?

Personally i'd recomend not using £30 access points, but thats mainly due to a lot of bad experiencs with the cheap d-link kit! In all of my smaller primary schools we deploy Netgear WG302's, which have been very solid, and support around 10 - 20 clients per point with little trouble. They are about £120 each though. Steve

Just finished installing 16 Dell Optiplex 755 USFF all in one pc's in a suite, and have ordered another 40 for various schools that we support. They have been really good, and no one could come anywhere near them on price, although I think the LEA have a contract negotiated with Dell. Steve

We use a little program called autosizer to automatically maximise windows on some pc's. Automatically Resize Your Programs - AutoSizer Steve

Yea i did! Thought it would make a nice change to get outside for a bit, so spent a couple of days doing it a few weeks back. One of the other technicians is just setting up the server for the camera's and data logger this week.

I've been involved with a project putting a couple of camera's and temperature sensors in the school pond, fair enough thats loosely in my job description - until I found out they wanted me to dig the pond as well!

Haven't got a 2008 server to try this on, but these instructions apply for vista, so guess they should do what you want: Start,Run --> Gpedit.msc --> Local Computer Policy, Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, System, Logon --> “Hide entry points for Fast User Switching Steve

We're a primary school, and provide support to 6 other primary schools. Steve

I may be totally wrong, but isn't one of the options from the exchange cd to install the admin side of things, which you should be able to do on your pc? Steve