Halfmad

I changed the projectors we were getting to a type with easy filter access, it's saved me a great deal of time. Although I do use a can of compressed air for cleaning I do usually remove the filter anyway to do so, makes a better job of it. 30 projectors, some require the projector to be taken off the mount and take a while longer but on the whole I manage to do all of them in about 5 hours every second friday. This prevents us ever having problems with error messages etc. I do see it as a waste of my time though, I think I'm to highly paid to be doing this sort of work. I do it on a friday afternoon when the kids aren't here and most staff vanish, sometimes use a ladder but usually just jump on a desk - yes I know I'm a bad boy but they're usually more sturdy than the schools ladders!

We use easymail and if it help we've no cookie restrictions on the PCs (although it's not set to accept all).

I have a 1100W freestanding A/C unit in my server room on 24/7 (unless it gets too cold). It's enough to cool a 7mx3m room with 10 servers. NOT south facing though, luckily.

That's brightened up my day no end! Wish I had pupils that were that amusing! I do understand the frustation of 5th and 6th years in the school with regards to Bebo etc but there are reasons behind them being banned and we're not just doing it to give ourselves some sort of perverted power rush.

We go for Dell too, mostly on price and being able to deliver large quantities at fairly short notice and to customised specification. We've also had a very very low rate of DOA equipment from Dell in the past year, something I sadly can't say for Apple

I bought 120 Dells last year, mixed models from the 210L (cheap cheap!) to the 745. Not one of them had ANY faults, not even a faulty mouse.. I was very impressed especially by the cheapy 210L which we put into business studies, the suite is running like a dream and at the time it came in at under £430 per computer!

I had WoW running great on a little D600 I borrowed from work when my main PC blew it's PSU up! 32Mb Radeon card, although capital cities were a little laggy.. :-D

I registed for OGC Catalist pricing recently, instantly saved £120 on a large A3 inkjet when ordering from equanet!

I love pointless games and only recently broke my MMORPG addiction to WoW, DAOC, UO, Eve online etc. Although I do still have my eve subs running.. don't tell the fiancee

Are you able to lock out some of the more advanced features on NSM? for example logging, deployment of software etc? problem is there aren't ANY member of staff I'd trust to use those safely.. more aren't that good at even logging out of a PC for security reasons nevermind getting them to be careful..

Hardware/software - done by centennial (council policy). The rest to be honest wouldn't be enough to justify it even if it was just a few hundred quid sadly. There's very little that I can't do with Winstall LE, scripts and policies

blocked here although the kids just use proxy sites to gain access :-P

That's the problem with Impero really, we already do a lot of that through other servers software which has already been purchased and been in use for 1 year + It's very hard to justify Impero even though it's cheaper as it has the potential to interfere with other systems. Ric_ I'll have a look at NSM I must admit that I think NSS does everything we really need though!

As Webman says there's usually a digital zoom menu option on projectors even if they do have an optical zoom.

I've been testing both of these out in classrooms, one using Impero and the other NSS. I like both and don't really have a preference although staff are leaning towards NSS quite heavily, especially those who were using Impero then got a shot of NSS for an afternoon. Cost wise Impero is far cheaper (25% or so), however knowing our HT we'll either get all or nothing so I'm not really taking this into account. Any views on this?

I thought it might be something as beautifully simple as that Geoff, cheers!

I'd rather be known for being professional from my actions and the work I do than present a false image, as happens a lot in IT. I'm not saying those on here do it (fact you post here states you're more professional than most) but in my previous job we had some "professional" analysts who did the same job as me, wore suits, knew how to talk about it but couldn't do any of the work without one of us scruffs helping them every step of the way. Clothing means nothing, suit would put me off rather than make me think someone knows what they're doing and mostly because of those bad past experiences of suited IT folks :-|

I give you two years before you're wandering around in underpants and a string vest 8O

I personally think shirts and ties looks a bit daft on technical staff when they're crawling around under desks or leaning over computer equipment the just get in the way. I wear a short sleeved shirt at work but would prefer just to wear plain dark t-shirts instead. I doubt anyone would bat an eyelid either. If I was hiring in an I.T. firm and they turned up in shirts and ties I'd assume they were managers who knew sweet FA about the technical side :-D

Odd problem yesterday, reserved an IP for one of my access points and although the AP itself picked up the IP address I'd assigned to it's MAC address the DHCP listing in active directory doesn't show it as in use. Any idea why? it's a very, very minor issue but something that's boggled me!

I'd love to block MP3s for staff too, at the moment I ask them not to store them as most of them have removed any that did have. I make it clear that it's not just MP3s it's all audio formats (you'd be amazed how some try to get around it - because it's not a MP3 as such..) I remove about 80 MP3s from students folders each week, a more corrupt network manager might use those to stay up to date with the charts.. :-P

It sounds like you're going to have to make a new user with admin rights, login and see if this sorts the problem when logged in as this new user. If it does the default user profile will probably be sound and you just need to force it to create new profiles for the existing users. rename the other users profile folders (so it's forced to make new ones) then bring their settings back across from the old profile folders if you have to (documents etc.) It's how I'd approach it anyway :-) Sure someone will have a two click method of fixing it though!

That appears to have sorted it Nathan, gold star and a smiley face for online support efforts :-D Pretty sure I tried it yesterday but I've obviously not been sending it down to child objects or something equally as stupid!

I'm pretty sure I tried that yesterday and it didn't work, shall give it ago again though Nathan, cheers. Having a brain fart day today!

No idea if this is possible, I've come across a problem where some of our older files/folders don't have ANYONE set with rights to change permissions etc, the most anyone has is modify and that person is just a normal user. I think it's a problem I inherited here and that the admin rights for these files are only available to the old domain (well and truely scrapped) domain admins. The problem is that I want to get these files security settings tweaked, but can't. I can't change permissions at all but there is the possibility of moving them onto a FAT drive, I don't suppose that'd remove this problem? *grasps at straws*