srochford

Sagemcom Digital | Freeview Products - I've got the DTR67320T which is just Freeview but has a hard disc and USB slot for "exportation" of video (they're in transport stream format - basically MPEG2) Sagemcom Digital | Sagemcom Freesat DTR94250s Set Top Box Spec Satellite HD Digital Recorder is a Freesat box and it has a USB slot as well. I've not read the blurb but pretty sure this will do the same.

More RAM! 4Gb doesn't feel like enough if you're going to be working with multiple RAW images. Definitely need a good backup system - that disc will fail at some point (not because it's a Samsung but because that's what happens to spinning discs!) and there's not going to be happiness if the pictures are lost :-) Photoshop can use multiple cores (John Nack on Adobe: What's the story with Photoshop & multi-core?) but I think that whether you benefit depends on what you are doing - some stuff won't be improved by multicore but would be better with faster discs.

I don't disagree with this (I wrote an essay saying more or less this for my PGCE about 30 years ago!) but what do we do with all the people who don't have jobs because they make HP (or whoever) inefficient? I don't think we can all have "The Good Life" style gardens with our own goats etc for food so how do we get the money to pay the rent and buy our food?

You don't say what version of Office you're currently using. If it's Office 2007 then it's not a big change to go to 2010 but if it's 2003 then it's a major change and a key thing that needs to be in place is an opportunity for staff to get familiar with it well before next term starts. There's a need to migrate at some point (eventually even HP and Dell will stop shipping XP drivers!) but it needs to happen at a time when it won't disrupt teaching and learning but will benefit it. That time might be now - it would be good to talk through with teaching staff the sort of benefits that they can get from this. I like Windows 7 but there are very many differences in the way it works - are you ready for the new style profiles? Will you be able to move every machine to Windows 7? If not, how will you cope with 2 sets of profiles? What are you doing about libraries? How will you configure search indexing? Have you checked all your apps to see how they cope with user access control? Have you let key staff see what the machines will look like with Windows 7 (you want to get the keen staff on your side; there are always going to be a few who don't like any change and you can't do much about them)? Get them to try out a dummy build and let you know what they think. If it doesn't work (because in spite of your best efforts something just doesn't work!) have you got a rollback plan - how quickly could you put XP back on the machines?

If you want to save typing then: SET L will also give you the logonserver name :-) Incidentally, this is not necessarily the server which is authenticating you now but it is the server which processed your logon request.

I think that netdom isn't installed on a machine by default (it's part of RSAT) but I'm pretty sure it works (we use it locally for renaming the machines and I know the help for the command shows that you can use it remotely)

Assuming it's a domain member you can just use netdom: netdom /renamecomputer oldcomputername /newname:newcomputername /userD:domain\username /passwordD:ReallySecret /force /reboot

It may only be 3% of the employees but it's still 9,000 people who won't have a job and will need to find some other way of getting money to buy food etc. It makes a nonsense of claims by politicians that the public sector should shed staff and the private sector will employ them - everywhere you look, the private sector is shedding staff as fast it can (because they're "inefficient")

What I don't understand is the big panic. We had almost no growth in the economy last year but it seems reasonable to expect it to grow by perhaps 2% this year and maybe more next year. This then brings in much more tax revenue and that helps to pay off the debt. Before Cameron was elected, he was promising to increase public spending without having to put up taxes because he could just make the economy grow and use that income to pay for the spending. Now I know that since then we've spent goodness knows how much on buying banks but those are assets we can sell again (as I understand it, even if we sold today we'd be in profit by several billion; if we wait 2-3 years we'll be in many, many billions of profit). Perhaps I'm being cynical but this smacks of a government that for political reasons wants to be able to cut tax for the richest few (eg the capital gains tax which is paid by about 2% of the population) or sell off shares in the banks at a give away price so that people who buy the shares get rich (as happened in the 80s with gas, BT etc, etc) rather than one that's concerned about doing the best for the whole country.

Not me, guv, honest :-) We've still just about got sunshine in London so I went for a walk and looked at some of the elephants (no, not the pink ones, these ones: Home - Elephant Parade London 2010 - Elephant Family)

I'm guessing the OP wants to automate this; if so, there's a program in c:\windows\ehome called wtvconverter which can automate this process.

Can I add a poll to this: "Would EduTech look better with a paper bag over his head?" :-)

Not leg pulling; amongst other things, the students are taught parallel programming. The students are expected to write Fortran code which can max out all cores and also investigate things like whether it's better to use 4 cores at full speed or to try and use the Hyperthreading to get 8 parallel threads. The more adventurous students also look at massively parallel programming where they link multiple machines. Of course, if they're just using Facebook and Spotify then this is a bit of overkill (but at least their Matlab and Maple jobs do get a separate core to run on!)

What I think you could do is have a machine startup script which checks to see "am I going into exam mode" and, if so, sets the autoadminlogon stuff, else it clears it. How does it know if it should be in exam mode? Simplest way would be to check a server where you have a list of machine names (perhaps in a text file or a SQL database). if I find my name in that list then I go into exam mode. You could generate that list as part of the startup process - ie you're presumably sending WoL packets to the machines so before you do that to each machine you add to the list of exam mode computers. An extra touch would be to add the time at which the exam mode should stop.

Do you have a serial cable to connect to the switch? If not they're cheap and you do need one - Videk Online You probably need the part 4070 on that page (9 pin female to 9 pin female) but if your laptop doesn't have a serial port then you also need a USB to serial converter - Videk Online If you're running XP then Hyperterminal is already available (may need to add it in Control Panel) or you can just download a free edition - Free HyperTerminal Private Edition Download - you'll need this for Windows Vista or Windows 7 If you've only got a Mac laptop then things are harder because I don't think you'll have a serial port and the USB to Serial adapters don't always come with Mac drivers. Connect the serial port to the switch, set the baud rate in your terminal program to 9600 with 1 stop bit and no parity (it's just drop down menus; not as scary as it looks) When you've done that, just press Enter a couple of times and the switch should respond. If it's asking for a password then you're probably stuck if no-one has kept a record of what they set (the default is username admin and no password so give it a try) You can then get the IP address and browse to it from a web browser. I'd really try and get Wireshark working - it's one of those tools that's essential at times like this. As others have said, it sounds like some kind of packet storm and Wireshark will show you that (you don't have to understand it - basically, you have wireshark running with the core switch and server etc and you'll see little traffic. As you plug in other switches you'll see more traffic and when you plug in the switch leading to the fault you will see mega traffic. That then points you to where the fault is and you can start isolating from there) Good luck

It's just one of those things that many people in IT don't appreciate. Lots of users can't follow instructions on screen (even what you or I would think of as really straight forward) and like the "comfort blanket" of having a piece of paper to follow. I'm guessing she has access to a printer somewhere else in order to print ...

Maths department currently buying quad core i7, 4Gb RAM, 1Tb disc - think they're massively over-speccing disc and under-speccing RAM Standard teaching machine is quad core i5, 4GB RAM, 500Gb disc

WMI won't work - at best, you'll get a non-interactive logon session. You can just set the autoadmin registry key (together with default username, password and domain) and then reboot - this will logon the machine at next restart. Remove those keys when you've finished. If you have a group policy to clear "last logged on username" then you'll have to do those settings in a machine startup script (the GPO will clear it but the script runs later so puts them back!)

Probably - it seems to support a huge range of cards. You can run Mythbuntu from a Live CD so you don't have to change anything on your machine - that will tell you if it's going to work straight off. If that works then install it permanently. If not, get the device ID from Windows device manager and google that. sometimes USB TV tuners carry names like "technotrend" but are actually made by someone else and that's the driver you need to find.

I'm not a lawyer but, sadly, I don't think you can go from "employers do need to make reasonable adjustments" to "your job is not going to be under threat" For example, I think some people's migraine can be triggered by fluorescent lights so it would be reasonable for an employer to change them or fit diffusers etc. If someone has a visual impairment but could work if they had a 32" screen then it would be reasonable to get one. If there's no reasonable adjustment which can be made then it may be that someone can't continue in their job - for example, it's pretty difficult to make reasonable adjustments if you're a window cleaner who becomes a wheelchair user. Let's hope it doesn't come to that - there are still lots of things which can be checked out. @nephilim, you say you're using a CPAP machine but it's not working as well as you'd hoped. Have you had your sleep monitored? Are you now sleeping OK (I'm assuming you have sleep apnoea and if that's still a problem then I suspect that could cause migraines and needs to be addressed)

It's a few years ago now but the College I used to work at went from Learnwise to Moodle. It did take a bit of time for people to get used to it but a key thing we did was to move as much as possible of the content across so staff didn't have to re-key or re-upload stuff. It worked pretty well and Moodle proved to be very successful. I suspect that if the users had just been given Moodle (or any other VLE) with no content and told "here you are, now get started" there would have been much more resistance!

Because you're wrong :-) Some independent schools may pay lower salaries than the state sector but others pay much, much higher salaries because they want to attract the best staff. The first batch of academies are supposed to be "outstanding" schools and they're also likely to want to get good staff and retain them - you don't do that by offering less money than the school down the road. I wouldn't be surprised to see academies paying higher salaries to teaching staff and key support staff but I think it's too early to say for sure.

I suspect it's because the other Mr Ben has stormed your pirate ship and is now holding you captive somewhere in the West Midlands. We'll wait for a ransom demand but I'm afraid that budget cutbacks mean we won't be able to pay it :-)

I've always been an early riser (only missed 1 breakfast in 3 years as a student!) so I wouldn't see it as "suffering" to not get a lie-in at the weekend! I like to be up and doing stuff when the sun's up so although I don't normally work at the weekend I do get all the domestic chores done as early as possible leaving the rest of the weekend free everything else:-)

If you've got access to TV and can watch BBC World News you'll find that also carries adverts and even if you're in the UK you can look at http://www.bbcworldnews.com/ and you'll see adverts there as well.