Butuz

Thats a good way of doing it Richard. Do you have a large technical team? Andrew

Whenever we have had Promethean boards installed they refuse to run VGA cables longer than around 15 metres. I am willing to wager your cables are simply too long, or wired up incorrectly. It astounds me that "builders" installed your cables and not network / audio visual technicians / engineers? Butuz

Am I the only person that actually like my USB sticks to be empty? Cant stick autorunning USB sticks with annoying backup software. Butuz

Waaaaaa someone give me some money please!!! Butuz

Wow thats a pretty shocking article! Thank god articles like this are now coming out!!! Butuz

Thats good to know!!! Welcome to Edugeek! Butuz

Sounds like a good setup matey! Should be darned easy to maintain - SIMS update? What sims update? I just updated 50 clients in 2 minutes Butuz

As far as I am aware SIMS.net requires MS Office 2003 for everything to work properly. Andrew

Eh? When I bought another 70 hp's six months ago RM wouldnt supply them? Ended up buying somewhere else. That was before I discovered Axel though.... otherwise I would have ordered 70 Axels.... Out of interest did your boss give a reason for spending an extra 30% per unit to get a slower, larger, more cumbersome, non TFT mountable, and potentially less reliable thin client?? Was it just the sound? Butuz

Its not Scott's fault the yanks are uneducated Butuz

To be honest as long as your RM Network is up to date with Hotfixes etc - XPSP3 doesnt really add anything new. I am waiting for SP3 to come out whenever RM see fit to release it. Butuz

I notice your throwing around 500gb drives. This means you are running bog standard SATA./IDE drives in these servers yes? Frankly you should be running RAID5 SCSI / SAS setups on all of your servers as apart from the speed increase (particularly when serving multiple small files) they are far, far more reliable. Thats the first thing I would change if I were you. Andrew

Its the answer to all your problems!! * Terms and conditions apply. Typical interest rate: morethanyouearn% Butuz

I recon - it is infact an empty box!! I hope you didn't pay too much for it! Butuz

Ah but are those bills actual costs of living such as gas bills, or car tax, or are those bills credit card and loan bills for all the fancy stuff they buy but don't need? Of the few people I know really struggling - its because they choose to fritter their money on several credit cards, or a nice car. Butuz

Spiceworks - not only will it tell you how much memory you have but it will also tell you every little detail about each computer such as software they have isntalled, right down to serial number! Butuz

I paid £195pcm to share a 4 bed detatched house in Cardiff all last year. But to be honest we were very lucky with that one. Paying £275/mo now to live in a much smaller flat with no garden! *sigh* Butuz

Our results have been good for a long time - our numbers always high and used to be 20% pupils from out of catchment. The LEA has stepped in and capped our intake as well as capping the number of out of catchment pupils we can have. Basically - be a successful school but get punished because too many kids from the local PFI school are coming here despite old buildings and old equipment etc....and to think the LEA are constantly babbling about parental and pupil "choice" - some choice! Butuz

Ric - it's raid 5 yes but with a hardware raid card with 64mb memory. Butuz

Well - I would say you will probably only need one server, though it is up to you if you wish to future proof or have some redundency. I have run up to 38 clients on an older spec server (Dual 3.4 Xeon, 4GB, 3 x 73GB 15k RPM) and I now have two more new servers (Dual 2.3Ghz Quad Core, 4GB RAM, 3 x 73GB 15k RPM) so will run 100 clients across three servers. The 4GB Mem limit of Windows 2003 Standard 32bit is the limiting factor on how many thin clients you can have per server. Ideally you should use 64bit Win2k3 and run as much memory as the server could fit. I would guesstimate a top spec quad core server with 8 or 12GB could run well over 60 clients. Unfortuatly our system is the RM Client Connect system and they only currently support Windows 2003 Std 32 bit - hence 3 servers. As for the benefits of thin client I would list them as: For: * Lower Initial cost. * Dramatically lower power usage (eg Axel client = 9watts per unit) * The above = dramatically lower heat output, and dramatically lower electricity costs. * Ease of installation - 3 minutes to unbox and set up an Axel client, 26 seconds from cold boot to logon screen * Ease of managment and troubleshooting - spend 15 minutes uninstalling Office 2003 and installing Office 2007 on my 3 servers and hey presto = 100 clients updated with no downtime and no restarts! * Better lifecycle - with no moving parts thin clients should theoretically be able to survive for 20 years. Either way - no more replacing every workstation every 3 years! All you need to do is replace the terminal servers as often as you need - eg 3 or 5 years. * All the above = much lower total cost of ownership. or as I like to putit - making ICT Sustainable.... Against: * Bad multimedia performance - this is down to the thin client hardware itself. As newer more improved thin clients come onto the market this will be less and less of a problem. Personally I think thin client develoment is being driven by education at the mo - It is us that needs Multimedia performance wheras in most businesses - they never needed to cater for all of their thin client users trying to view fulscreen video from youtube!!!!!! * Lack of flexibility. If all of a sudden some new software came in that was highly demanding you would have a problem if all your ICT suites were thin client. This will be negated as time goes on by more powerful thin client units... but for now just have to hope you dont get landed with some kind of hideous badly written bloated java software.... Butuz

Props to the Head for putting the kids first and refusing to be bullied. Props to the Govenors too for having the balls to back their head 100%. Butuz

To be brutally honest - they never have been a networking powerhouse in the same way as Cisco (or HP nowadays). They used to make good network cards back in the day when you could only get 3Com, Intel and Adaptec - but they've never made particularly good switches. Most definatly. HP here - and happy. Butuz

We wont go into CC3 v Vanilla as thats been debated before - but as the Network Manager it's your job to decide where to order from in order to provide best value for the school. This may be RM, this may be PC World. Either way, it's your decision. Butuz

To be honest I do not see a problem with someone signing up to advertise a job. As long as they do not tread on the toes of SpecialAgent the forum sponsor - i.e if someone signed up and started acting as a job agent and advertising multiple jobs or requesting CV's - then yes I would agree - delete those posts. Butuz

Your first post was a job advert??? Butuz