Sarconia

I still class American food as the worst food in the world then again I must be one of the few people who lives in America for a while and actually manages to lose weight. Bearing in mind that I was shopping in supermarkets and not really eating out that much - the eating out experience is fairly good and the customer service is generally excellent - much better than over here and I did quite like Wal-Mart. I ended up living on a diet which basically consisted of nothing but vegetables, salad and fruit and even then a lot of that tasted a bit strange. I tried loads of products and gave up in the end because whilst they looked ok in the packaging as soon as they entered my mouth I could only think "yuck". Hersheys chocolate... what is that? lol, Kool-aid... umm, I like the colour... that's about it, chicken soup which has... 1 piece of chicken in it? Peanut butter which was so greasy, I didn't expect everything to be the same, I'd eaten food from loads of different places and it's always different... but this was generally a bit nasty. I don't think it's the amount of fat people in the US which really shocked me, it was the size of those who happened to be fat - they are huge.

I had a look into taking a holiday the other year, it turned out to be too expensive in the end but the one location which seemed to stand out time and time again for all of us and the fussy criteria which many people had was Italy. Bulgaria was also on the contemplation list but was swiftly removed after a friend of mine went out there, he walked into a bar, ordered a drink, was then asked to pay the equivalent of about £500 for it, turned around and there were two big guys pointing guns at him. Whilst that could happen anywhere in the world and to anyone whilst they are on holiday, it did put us off somewhat.

SIMS runs fine on Windows Vista - I've been using it myself on a daily basis for about a year! As far as running SIMS on Windows 7 goes, I understand that it also works fine - some of the schools I support are using it and I've not had any calls from them saying that it doesn't work (they definitely would've complained if it didn't). It must work otherwise Capita wouldn't support it (although I believe they only support 32bit clients at the moment). In regard to not having to give the users virtually full access to the folders which SIMS uses... I don't think there is any way round that still.

This is erm... very scary indeed considering that I support this school and may have to go there on site at some point.

Ah that's not so bad then, a smaller graphics card might fit at a push. I know it probably sounds weird but I've got a friend who doesn't have any floor space at all... he ended up quite litterally screwing his desktop case into the wall! I usually say that middle of the road is about one generation behind the current technology - it's still good and will last for many years but it doesn't come with the hefty price tag of the current higher end stuff. For example, I wanted an i7 but they're really a bit too expensive coming in at about £220 the last time I looked, instead I went down to my local computer fair and found a brand new boxed Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 for £70. You've got to shop around but you can get some good deals that way. Still, as everyone else has already said, it's all down to your budget really.

My housemate comes out with comments like this all the time, I correct him all the time but he still believes that he's right even after I've chucked a bucketload of proof in his direction, usually courtesy of the internet. After editing a document he wrote to include bullet points as it really did need them. "Yeah, I'm going to edit that out as I haven't started using bullet points yet..." Whilst watching Crank 2, at the very beginning of the film: *Yells* "It's a pacemaker"... "No.. it's an artificial heart.. a pacemaker is a device which shocks your heart" ... "it's a pacemaker" and then the film gives the explanation about artificial hearts... lol

Well... I can't help it but I always think "fail" when the words gaming and small form factor are found in the same sentence as the performance of a build which is small will never match that of a desktop tower. The best graphics cards nowadays are flipping huge and struggle to fit in a case of that size let alone anything smaller. I'm also not sure what you mean by not expecting fully detailed graphics @1080p but still want it to be better than your 360? I own a 360 (ok, I've not turned it on in months) but I've never noticed it to be lacking in detail when running at 1080p. My general advice would be that it is possible to build a budget rig but you generally have to be prepared to upgrade a few bits now and then. It's a bit of a constant battle VS upgrading technology really, I've found that the most efficient method is to keep building middle of the range machines and moving the bits over to another machine when it becomes incapable of playing the latest games. The processor, motherboard and PSU are the most important bits to spend money on as those are the three which you are least likely to upgrade, RAM/HD's/Graphics cards can be swapped with relative ease compared to those.

Well, the date when my social life goes down the drain has been set. I was absolutely addicted to FFXI back in college, Mithran Red Mage for the win! I just hope my PC can play it at the max resolution... I've only got 4GB of ram now after my PSU blew up and took the motherboard and half my ram with it. The replacement motherboard I've got is obviously a complete load of crap which must be bottlenecking like no tomorrow as my other machine... AMD3500+, 2GB ram, old IDE HD somehow load Windows 7 just as fast and feels more responsive. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB Ram, Geforce 9800GTX+... wonder how well it'll do, lol. I'll give it a go on my old AMD as well when I get home tonight

I've heard of this before although I'm scratching my brain now. I think that there was a patch for this actually although I think a temporary solution was to restart the SQL service.

I'm 23 now. I've always had a job of sorts ever since I was 16, my first cleaning job whilst I was at college paid for my driving lessons and my first car and my job as a dinner lady (yes, lol, I cooked and served school dinners for a few years) whilst at uni helped stem the tide of debt a bit. After leaving Uni I did a work placement in London for a month which was ridiculous, it cost me more than they were paying me just to travel there. I was offered the job at the end of it amazingly but I told them to shove it as it wasn't enough money - I'd rather be sitting at my parents house than getting into more debt. I then managed to get a job with a big company which was a complete joke - I'd have been better off being a full time dinner lady, same pay, 100x less stress and virtually nobody being nasty for no apparent reason. After that I got another job in a similar but surprisingly easier role and moved to London for it.

I have a colleague from my previous job who does exactly that. He'll just camp out at the bar and watch the machines and then when enough people have played them and not won anything, he'll swoop in and go for gold.

It works for me using Win XP, Office 2003 and IE7. It sounds quite random, I'd compare settings on a system where it does work to the one on where it doesn't. I can't really think of anything else which would be of help for this.

Hmm, this topic certainly has gone round in a few circles of confusion already! I've not seen this error before, it sounds like it'd either be the settings in excel as LosOjos stated above or there is something wrong with the marksheet in AM7. I'd run all of my usual checks such as checking what .net framework is installed, that all windows updates have been applied, running Validate Memberships + Database Diagnostics, although I'd say they probably wouldn't help with this (but it's best to do them anyway as really, you never know). If you've got full SQL and not the express version I'd say it might be worth running a trace using the SQL profiler, it doesn't take long and then at least then if any errors come up you'll know that it's a problem with a procedure in SIMS and not Excel and that it's time to go to Capita.

I was referring to the level of service which I, myself provide! Trainee's should only accompany others who are experienced really. That's what being a trainee is about, you are in training and should be trained, preferably not let loose on your own whilst you're still clueless. In regard to the rest of the topic, I said the other week that Capita/SIMS are a bit like Microsoft when they had a monopoly on everything back in the 90's early 00's. They had a monopoly and their products weren't particularly great but the consumers had no choice so they ran with it anyway. Now that MS actually have some competition and have been fined by the EU (I forget how many times) they are actually much better. IE has been steadily losing it's % share of people using it and I believe that we will see a lot more people using open source OS's in the future. As soon as it's possible to play most games on Linux, I'll be gone! @Mr_Writer: That is a very interesting article indeed, it seems that SIMS has always been in the spotlight on and off for anti-competitive behaviour. I remember someone at a SIMS conference once saying "Our local LA, Bedfordshire... continues to push the RM solution". I had absolutely no idea why until I looked up SIMS one day on wikipedia and I almost spat what I was drinking out all over my monitor. Now I understand that Wikipedia isn't always accurate, however... and this applies to all things, all rumours come from a truth which usually isn't known to many. There has to be some sort of fire to start the rumour going, otherwise there wouldn't be one.

It's not a Ford KA so it's all good. I hate those heaps, nothing screams "I'm a namby pamby" and "I'm also a useless driver" to me more than a Ford KA..

Yeah, I mean after all... £500 for an install? It can only be a) Someone remotes on and installs a patch through DBupgrade (not hard) or b) Someone remotes on and runs an installer package and clicks next 10x (also not hard). £1150 for one days training? *falls over* Maybe I should start selling training! Also, I like the 600 texts included... but if you compare that to the prices quoted on the schoolcomms website of £65 for 1000 texts, it means those 600 texts are worth approx £39. I'm struggling to see how this is in any way not a rip off when compared to schoolcomms... for the same price you could get their most expensive multi user 1500+ students license and 20,000 texts.

Yeah, I'd definitely migrate your data before you moved server. The Capita migration tool won't let you select the SIMS2005 instance on your old server and migrate it to a new SQL2008 instance on your new server. Both the new instance and the old instance have to be on the same server. Once you've got your data on SQL2008 running on Win2k3 you can then detach the database to transfer it over to the new server.

Hmm, now that you've mentioned it, I can't remember whether or not we went to a website to access the demo of MCAS or set it up on our own server here... gah, my memory fails me.

We think alike I'm not affiliated in any way to them but I thought the demo of MyChildAtSchool was great, everything was clear, concise and colour coded - which is a must when you're dealing with parents half of whom probably struggle to use a PC.

Yeah, what has been said above is correct. Add the member of staff into Focus | Person | Staff When in System Manager use the option which states 'add an existing user of the system' on the welcome screen and then select the user from the drop down list (they should appear, as this list populates from Personnel). I really should write a little document explaining this issue as it's always something which just keeps coming up.

I don't really know that much about these other MIS applications, however a particular school who used to give me a headache on an almost daily basis recently moved over to iSAMS. They knew exactly what they wanted and were often frustrated that the software simply didn't work and that any issues reported took years to fix - this was where my headache came in, trying to explain a complex and specific issue to someone half the world away whose English and probably coding skills too aren't that great was a nightmare. It must have been a big decision for them to move over and someone there at iSAMS must have really impressed them with the software. Still, what I'm saying is as many people here haven't really used any of these other MIS and I'm sure all of these companies have case studies where they quote the names of the schools, they might even have a list of customers. If I were you I'd google these schools and give them a ring and enquire nicely if they'd like to discuss the general usage of their MIS with you - I'm not sure if anyone would be willing to talk about it but if they did then at least you'd get the truth as the customers (unlike sales reps) generally won't lie about the product.

There shall be a PM coming your way shortly

I have to agree with Creese here. Politicians get paid loads of money to think, we are here to vote.

No droughts down here in London as far as I know... it rained quite a lot the other week. Never had a hosepipe ban when I lived up in the midlands either. In actual fact I remember wading through a fair few roads in and around Stafford which had actually been flooded one summer... the water was so high, it even got into my pants (what a dire feeling that was!).

Seconded... cant believe that they are all just sitting around with not a lot happening to them.