Halfmad

Fooby - you're a genius mate, no idea why I didn't think of that on Friday! Having said that I hadn't realised there was the option to do that (there is - it's under the bitmap menu)

I suggest for the first 30 mins of the day you spend it making sure everyone knows your working on the problem and that the internet etc is down for the time being, until you get back to them. Get an announcement made on the PA system if you have one or talk to heads of department - or if you do have someone working below you, get them to do it whilst you work on the problem. communication in schools is key, if teachers know about the problem they can alter their planned work for the day accordingly.

Personally I'd have more than 2Gb of RAM for video editing, 4Gb would be more appropriate.

OK odd problem! Using BGinfo to set the desktop with some info on pupil login, works perfectly except on computers that haven't been imaged/reinstalled in the past 1year + However I get an errpr with pupils not having access to the windows folder so BGinfo can't write the background. On all the images I've done, every single one it works perfectly. But what I'm thinking is that the older ones were moved onto our new domain about a year ago and thus might well have some old NT4 permissions floating about or causing conflicts. Sounds feasable? I've checked the actual permissions in users/groups locally and they seem fine, tried changing them but it doesn't seem to have any effect. I'm guessing it's a gpedit.msc permission or a previous setting setup on the NT4 server that's causing the problem. Oddly I have the same image and recently remade it, this works fine. But if I try an identical computer that came from our old domain it doesn't work. I only had 30 mins to checked this out today but it really got on my nerves Ps I was using a completely new user who never existed on the previous domain as I wanted to rule out cached profiles, although in hindsight it might be a problem with the default user profile!

PCWorld/Equanet/Inmac are all the same company. You should get a discount for being an education establishment though, they won't cost £6

I'd have to agree with Geoff, I don't have any specific role, as the only IT person on site I do the whole lot. I can call upon central I.T. but it's very rare for me to do so and generally only on hardware (network equipment) specifically where I simply don't have the passwords to access it and do the work myself. That wouldn't happen in a private company, there would be 3/4 people doing the same job (comms, desktop,servers, web sites) over 3/4 sites instead of 1 doing each site.

http://www.equanet.com/catalogue/item/vidpcc18 I'm not an enormous fan of them but they are extremely cheap and do the job. Some supplied cables seem to give slightly less ghosting than others but it's always present. I'm suggesting dual output cards now instead but these as a backup for departments that don't want the "expense" of a clear projection.

Chances are it's a problem with the laptops not getting an IP before they attempt to logon to the domain. Most network card drivers have some form of "pre logon check", I know the intel ones do. Essentially when anyone tries to logon it checks the domain is there, gets an IP and THEN tries to login.

PC world use the odd product to lure people in, that's usually the ones which are on their adverts on TV. The problem is that the average person going in will have a badly spec'd computer thrown on them with a pile of software they might not need or ever use and peripherals that are cheap and/or not needed as pack of a "package". Saying £900 worth of goods for £400 makes it look like a great deal to people but frankly you'd be better off spending £500 and getting what you need with the extras that you'll make use of. I'd told staff if they go near PC World not to come crying to me, the same goes for most high street retailers. If they want me to spec a Dell etc for them then fine I will but obviously I wont' support it. I have more faith in Dell than PC World by a fair bit at the moment especially as I seem to be getting Irish and Scottish chaps on the support lines these days instead of a guy with a dodgy english accent from India called "George".

Insight and Equanet (inmac) do them, you do get a bit of ghosting on screen though but our staff don't seem to mind. I'm out of the office just now or I'd look up my past orders and send you the part numbers. If you haven't found them by tomorrow I'll post them on here!

I was going to argue but in all honesty I can't, he's really doing the same thing as most terrorist leaders like Bin Laden. They all have a cause and they all justify what they're doing against that cause. So yeah, I'd probably second that. Whether he means to be evil or not he has the blood of tens of thousands on his hands and no doubt started feuds that will continue for generations.

There's talk of our school being given a grant to give every pupil a laptop, the problem is we have 80 or so laptops that the kids use already and frankly they get destroyed. I'd need at least one full time tech just to help me support 700+ laptops as they'd be forever breaking, messing up their settings at home etc. Ric_ - you'd still have to upgrade the thin clients every few years and lets face it mate kids break things!

Davyboi - I did that and they actually did do it, got an e-mail back from the google support team saying they were sorry that the safe search hadn't caught them and that they'd fixed the problem.

10 year lifespan? surely in 5 years you'll be doing dramatically different things on those PCs. Personally I'd take that with a pinch of salt - 10 years if you don't want to do anything different. PC will generally last 10 years in general - if you just do the same old stuff on them, it's when you start adding more that you have to update. That's the same with thin clients.. At the OP, personally I'd just tell them to get a new suite, it's what I'm advising my SMT to do from now on - ditch laptops/trolleys entirely as they just get destroyed and rarely get used. Apart from that you have all of the setup time each time the class wants to use them as the trolley has to be brought to the classroom, kids take them out, turn them on etc. Faster just to go to a suite that's booked out.

Qualifications are all well and good but they only make up about 20% of the knowledge that you need as an IT professional, apart from that you also need to have a very analytical method of troubleshooting with frankly most people can't do well. The adverts etc on TV make it look far too easy to walk into a highly paid IT job, stating the average salary is over £36grand etc. I find that most teachers that SHOULD be good at IT are generally the ones who don't understand how things interact, in other words computing and business studies teachers.

Cheers! I just found that when you mentioned about the text! I hadn't looked in the configurator since I set it up! I like NSS9, glad we got it as I ordered 8.5 the day before it was released! It's nice, find installing it much easier, although I only had the demo of 8.5 to play with. Great tool though, has helped me a lot so far in monitoring out troublesome PCs in the library etc. I'm rolling it out to the rest of the school over the summer

Is there anyway of getting a picture to display on the client computer when I connect to it instead of just showing a blank screen? I'm thinking it might actually be best sometimes if I can show that I'm using it remotely but without displaying what I'm actually doing. It seems that if I lock the computer (lock screen appears) then try to control the PC the lock is removed and the screen displayed.

It's worrying me that I can't think of anything. Genuinely I can't. Nope nothing. However being evil I feel no guilt

I thought so. Makes it even more mysterious I'll check my domain GPO but I don't think there's anything in there that ever restricts admins - as you'd expect.

Hi peeps, rather odd problem, I'm using an old image created by my predecessor and I'm guessing he used local GP to lock down certain parts of it. Even when logged in as a domain admin, which gets local admin rights I can't delete or add printers to the computer. I can however do it if I go into the local GP settings (gpedit.msc) and specifically set the restriction for "prevent deletion of printers" to DISABLED, however by default these settings are set to "not configured" which makes me wonder where it's getting the restrictions from! It's the only PC on the network that I have this problem with, even when logged in as a local admin I'm restricted so I was wondering if perhaps somehow the default user for the PC has been configured to be restricted and this is having a knock on affect with every subsequent user, regardless of domain permissions. Hope that makes sense, I'm about to sysprep this image but won't do so until I know it's as damn near perfect as I can get! At the moment I can work around this fault but it's just got me wondering about the local verus domain permissions

Use a portable air con unit here, works fine but it is at max all the time. It's not really a long term solution though, they're bulky and a bit noisier than built in or wall mounted units and of course if yours is as basic as mine you can't set a temperature - it's simply got "cool" settings

*hands him a banana* Good little monkeychimpboy!

ooh cheers Mr Hawkins

I will be for another 2 years then i'll have a massive 30m2 office and the same for a server room all on my own

No intention of installing Vista here yet, I have a copy for testing but I simply won't roll it out until I have reasons to do so. At the moment XP works brilliantly in the schools and I just don't see why I should lump on top a bloated OS which offered next to nothing that's worthwhile presently.