will_

I find it very telling that this rant has been rumbling on for two and a half years. I'd like to share with you the most unbelievable e-mail conversation I have had with one of their employees recently in which I was trying to stop the phone calls and e-mails. Me: Him: Me: Him: Me: Him: Ugh! What a revolting specimen. I know how many minutes there are in a day - not enough! Brushing aside the blatant disregard for grammar (I'm a teacher - I had to fight the urge to get one of my pupils to mark it and send it back), am I really being so unreasonable?

Yes but I'm after gigabit on all ports. :-) You could argue that it isn't necessary for its intended use but I'd rather buy something that I can later usefully re-deploy elsewhere. To my mind, 100Mbit is old technology. We've been offered one for £350 and I'm still eyeing up a few on eBay for a little under £300.

Wireless for pupil use, yes, but I want to be able to do remote management - Wake-On-LAN, then remote login.

I completely agree and, believe it or not, she might not mind. The one in the link is only 100Mbit on all but the uplink ports but I am watching a few others.

Interesting. I only excluded them because it failed when I didn't, but there you go; I suppose your mileage may vary!

Found them. The things I exclude are: /etc/hostname (although in your case it won't make much difference) /proc /lost+found /mnt /sys EDIT: I can't find it in my documentation but I think I had to exclude /boot as well (when cloning to a different box in order to avoid references to a disk that doesn't exist).

Would that still work going from a non-RAID to a RAID filesystem? If not, you can probably still do something similar: - Wrap up the old system in a tarball, omitting a few key directories that I can't remember at the moment but could find out if you like. - Reinstall the OS with RAID. - Unwrap the tarball over the new installation.

This is a very interesting thread. I don't have any solutions but a few thoughts: The image in the original post shows a number of different types of "jaggedness" - some lines wiggle up, some wiggle down, and some wiggle more than others. If you consider just the offsets caused by the wiggles, they form a sine wave: slightly down, very down, slightly down, slightly up, very up, very up, slightly up. It sounds as thought you've already reached the same conclusion but this suggests to me that the problem is almost certainly caused by interference from an analogue signal (and even "digital" signals are ultimately analogue by the time they reach the wire). Andytown, you could buy an ordinary plug and screw the wire into the earth terminal properly, running it through the strain relief as you would normally do with a mains cable. There has been a lot of discussion involving earthing things, and I think you're probably heading in the right direction by doing so. However, it might be worth ensuring everything is earthed in the same place. Minute differences in earth potentials can cause small currents to flow between them ("earth currents" or "earth loops"), which are what can cause the humming in audio amplifiers and may well also be the cause of your problems.

RS-232 is just a signalling protocol. It's been used (and, believe it or not, still is) in all manor of physical packages.

15 pins so it probably is the user port. Is this any help? http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/HCCS/HCCS_UserAnaloguePort_UG.pdf RS-232 tended to use 9- or 25-pin DB connectors.

We use Inkjets & Toners. Their prices are pretty good although they are somewhat inclined to keep phoning you up.

Oops! Sorry, I thought it was the same link I'd originally given. My mistake.

Ooh, where from? Direct from Netgear?

Googling around, the following two seem to be less expensive than most of the competition: * USRobotics USR997748 Courier (£224 here) * NETGEAR ProSafe GS748T (£430 here) Timbo, my usual supplier can do a 24-port gigabit switch for £120, although this in unbranded.

Thanks but I'm afraid it really has to be a single 48-port unit. It's for a big netbook trolley and there's only space for one 1U switch.

Any suggestions? There's a little place just down the road that's always done brilliant prices for network hardware but today he just shook his head and said, "Sorry, mate, we don't do 48-ports." Hmpf. I'd bargained on £250 but I'm not sure whether that's realistic. No fancy features required; unbranded's fine.

Could it be something to do with a screen-position switch being pressed (or over-pressed)? I'm talking about the little push-switches that usually sit near the hinge and tell the machine whether it's open or closed. The backlight going off made me wonder whether the laptop thinks it's closed.

No business yet but offering a free evaluation netbook without obligation (at 5 to midnight on a Saturday) can't be a bad start.

As long as that doesn't tie us into anything, then yes please, that sounds perfect. My number is in the e-mail I sent you.

Now you have my attention! I'd want to install Ubuntu Linux on it and generally mess with the configuration of everything. Would that be okay? I'm awaiting replies from a number of other suppliers, too, but this will definitely score you brownie points.

I did, about 90 minutes ago, but I sent it to info@ rather than simon@. I'll forward it to you now.

Just as the title says, really. I keep hearing about Dell Premier accounts and have found a lot of bumpf on their website saying how wonderful it is, but no Apply or Register button anywhere. Is there a secret handshake?

Does anybody remember Pod on the BBC micro - probably mid 1980s? It was an orange "person" (i.e. circle with limbs and a face) to which you could issue simple instructions – typically one-word verbs. It could do most things you could think of (or at least, that I could think of as a 6-year-old), including "explode". I have no particular reason for asking, other than nostalgia. I've tried a few searches but have been unable to find anything.

Thanks, Simon. E-mail sent.

Hi, I'd like some quotes for the following setup, please: 1 x Lapsafe Mentor trolley, setup to accept 36 netbooks and 12 laptops 36 x Dell Latitude 2100 netbooks: - Ubuntu Linux - Touchscreen - 802.11N wireless (Dell card) - 6-cell battery Are these Netbooks available in different colours? I quite like the idea of having 4 colour-coded banks of 9 netbooks (so that, say, one class uses red and yellow while another uses green and blue) but probably not if it will push the price up significantly. I've specified a Lapsafe trolley because I've heard good things about them and our current (unbranded trolley) is pretty terrible, but I'm open to persuasion if there are other good ones out there. I'm also interested in a set of spare batteries (x36) and a QCharger. How much would these add to the price? Thanks in advance.