Sarconia

Having owned both consoles for quite a while now, I'd say that you should buy a PS3 to start off with. My PS3 is my most played console now, I very rarely even turn my Xbox on. Admittedly, most of my friends are on the PS3 though but that isn't what primarily makes me turn a console on as I'm not a massive online gamer. It's £40 a year for an Xbox Live Gold Membership... so that's worth taking into consideration, especially if you're a cheapskate. If you've not got a blu-ray player then it's definitely worth buying. As for exclusives, it depends on what kind of games you're into really. I really like the God of War and Uncharted series', Heavy Rain is epic and I'm a massive RPG fan so I had to buy Demon's Souls too. PSN download games that are good too include Braid, Fat Princess, Trine (also on PC) and Wipeout HD. As everyone else has already said... the PS3 is a better media player than the 360 and I even like the PS3 interface better - it's fairly obvious where all of the options are located (unlike my Xbox which baffles me occasionally).

I'm with creese on this one, what a bunch of absolute morons! It's the same attitude as people buying say.. a pink laptop because 'it looks nice' rather than 'it's really high spec'. Looks over actual substance, argh!

Nice repair job I'm glad you're ok though, that must have been a very scary position to be in.

Haha... all that faffling around and it happened to be a printer driver issue. FMS normally has issues with printers... I'm not really too sure why it's so dependent on checking for printers before it even loads the program. I've always thought it should load regardless and then when you come to actually print, you might encounter issues... rather than being the other way round.

There are numerous issues with exporting CTF's which result in rollback transaction errors. There are also quite a few patches to resolve the issue so I'd recommend that you ask your local LA or Capita depending on who you're supported by as the chances are that there is a patch to resolve this.

That's true, I understand how everything links together in SIMS.net fairly well but I'm always learning new things. At the moment I'm having a nice 3-way headbang between a school, myself and an exam board (yes it is the usual one) over BTEC basedata/results. Nobody seems to know what's going on (the exams officer is new, I've never dealt with BTEC's before and the exam board is clueless). Trying to make sense of it all, well... I'll get there in the end, it's just that getting to that point with virtually zero guidance is difficult. For an NM though, I'd say all you'd really need to know is the technical side of SIMS.net, how to perform upgrades and installations.

Ah, you just sounded like someone who I knew then! Never mind

Hmm... by any chance are you located in Coventry? In regard to using SIMS though, I think it all depends on the person. I was chucked straight into it as well and had never heard of SIMS either before I applied for my previous job but because I've been using PC's and all kinds of software since I was hmm... 10? I was able to find my way round it and it began to make sense in regard to how it all linked together after a while. On the other hand, someone who doesn't really use PC's a lot other than to say... occasionally send emails and surf the net will struggle like no tomorrow with it as it just won't make sense to them as they're not really a computer user and probably don't have a clue about files, databases or anything like that. As you're I.T literate though, I wouldn't worry about it, especially if you've used another MIS before.

Even better is when they manage to swindle you into a job which is far beyond what you're actually supposed to be doing, for example you're so clueless about virtually everything having been just dumped in it completely, you don't even realise you're doing a different job to everyone else for the first 3 months. You then finally begin to have a bit of a clue, speak to your other colleagues and realise you're being shafted. You're working under a completely different job title as to what you're actually employed for and your job description says nothing about any of this, however it has a nasty clause which says "you have to do everything that your manager tells you". So you complain that this isn't fair and that you're actually doing a completely different job but then management throw the book at you for insubordination as you're not doing what your manager tells you to. (I.e: sit down, shut up and get screwed). You then effectively have two choices, continue on or leave.

Well that's just put me off, I had contemplated watching this but IMHO any show with canned laughter isn't worth watching.

You could remove/make inactive the courses from course manager but I doubt it would resolve the issue as course managers primary function is to feed data into your School Census, particularly for post 16 learning aims.

Aha, I was just about to start to explain and I see you've found it (I went to lunch!)

Hmm, now this is normally where I'd say "ok, it's time for me to remote in and have a look" as this is one of those things that is difficult to diagnose purely over the phone or via text. I'd also want to be 100% sure on what I was advising as duplicate classes can sometimes get rather out of hand. These problems are usually to do with the date range of when you have sent the timetable. I assume that you're sending the new timetable so that it starts from todays date until the end of the academic year? This infact may well be creating the duplicate, if the class has changed and is slightly different from the original then the curriculum matching wizard may detect them as two separate classes. There are usually two ways to resolve this, the classes can either be merged (if it will let you) on the merge curriculum screen in the curriculum matching wizard or the timetable can be sent for the whole academic year. If you do choose to try any of this though, please take a backup beforehand as I cannot be 100% sure without having actually seen it for myself.

In curriculum assignment by scheme do these old classes still exist? and are they currently greyed out? Also, do these old classes have students with memberships in them in the past? If there are students still in these classes in the past then I'm afraid that they will continue to appear until the academic year ends.

In regard to the server being called something else and having a different IP address, it's all fine as long as you ensure that everything which points to SIMS is changed. It all depends on the way you've set it up though, if your workstation connect.ini's redirect to the shared S:\ drive then you'll need to change the connect.ini on the shared drive only. You'll also need to move the DMS over and change the settings both using the DMconfig utility and SIMS.net. Let us know how it's all set up and then we can advise accordingly.

Opportunistic stealing... don't give them the opportunity because if you do... bang, they'll get you!

It seems to be random, we get schools which report this on and off from time to time. It seems to resolve itself when I re-enter exactly the same settings into the SIMS Services screen and save it again but I've no idea why as they are exactly the same settings as before...

I have to agree. Hopefully SOLUS 3 P2 will work well... as I know for a fact that P1 doesn't quite work as intended. There are still some issues with it not seeing all of the machines on the network and it sometimes fails to push out upgrades and installations. Still, it's in the testing phase so hopefully all of that will be ironed out once it does get released.

Holidays are a bit of a dodgy subject, I think we should all be entitled to one but I'm not sure about the compelling need that some people feel to go abroad for one. Personally, I can't justify the money spent on a holiday because it would just be me with my own thoughts walking round location X - I also imagine that it'd be a bit of a grim and boring affair going on holiday alone as after all, it's not where you are but who you are with that makes it (yes, I need some more friends, lol). I think at the end of the day, it all comes down to personal preference on what makes us all happy. I'm still on the hunt for a place where I enjoy my job (pay doesn't really matter too much as long as it's relevant to the job which I'm doing) and where I am able to meet and be friends with decent people.

I'm technically from an LA and I've seen people bashing LA's and I can understand their point of view as sometimes talking to the LA can be frustrating. E.g: If you've got a Citrix network and have a problem... there are some LA's who wont have a clue what it even is, let alone support it. As with all things it's swings and roundabouts, some people are good at their jobs and some people are useless - niether are immune to bashing though. Still, I'm interested to see exactly what they will do with this... so I'll probably sign up

Hmm, I'm not really too sure about MACs but my colleague uses one although he's installed Bootcamp so it's a dual boot machine rather than a VM and SIMS.net works fine there. It sounds like a permissions issue, ensure that you have full control to the shared S:\SIMS drive and I'd also check the connect.ini in your C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net directory (note: directory might be slightly different for Windows 7). This might redirect to S:\SIMS

I'll second that, Haynes manuals are great. With a bit of DIY, some basic tools and some elbow grease, virtually anything can be done. The £5 kettles are great, I've had one die on me but it was only £5 so I couldn't complain. 4years on and my £25 microwave is still working as well! A lot of the time, I find that people chuck relatively good items away because they simply can't be bothered. They come home from work and don't feel like doing anything, cannot face cooking a meal, cannot face doing any exercise, don't even want to contemplate tidying up or doing what I'd call "general maintenance tasks" such as actually ironing a shirt for work. I take the idea of "if it's going to save me money, I'll give it a go even if I'm totally clueless... google is always a good place to start". Plus, I couldn't bear sitting at home and doing nothing but watching TV, gah, I'd get bored within 2 seconds flat... I always have to be on the go. Sounds like you've got a good wife (?) there!

I managed to get a score of 3100 on my main machine on the high settings, not too shabby Even my 2nd machine managed 1200 on the lowest settings... it looks like I'll be happily gaming away.. sorry, losing my social life come September.

Don't get me started! London is even worse... the next job I get will hopefully not be down here as you have to earn ridiculous amounts and often it'd be much cheaper to take a smaller salary and live slightly further north. Northamptonshire looks good, lol!

The only issues I ever have with TV licensing is my mum ranting on saying that I need one just because I own a TV, I've told her a million times already that I paid for the TV, paid for the games console, paid for the games/DVD's, paid for the electicity and therefore do NOT need to pay to watch broadcasts which I can't even receive. TV licensing is a ridiculous farce, all of the channels it funds are complete and utter crap anyway. Back on topic... living alone and being completely independent is expensive, it's only possible to bulk buy non-perishables and generally buying smaller, individual items are more expensive. It's all about working out where your money goes which brings us to the question... where does it go? I'd say anywhere between 30-50% of it goes on accomodation, be it a mortgage or rental and then bills such as electric, gas and council tax. Another 10-15% most likely goes on food, a further 10-15% on travel costs, about 5-10% on other bills such as internet/mobile phone/gym, yet another 10-15% on either repaying debts or trying to save up and I'd say at least 5% on social events because all work and no play makes us all very dull. So depending on your situation and your outgoings it could be an "all money gone" situation quite quickly. Living cheaply is generally quite hard work as it takes time and effort hunting for good prices, cooking your own meals from scratch is cheaper but once again, it takes time.