Sarconia

And yet idiots such as my parents still continue to buy this drivel... I keep telling them but they just don't listen /sigh

Yes it is a Vauxhall. Although I've owned it for about 4-5yrs now and it's only began to drink oil recently... and by drink, every few months I need to top my oil up, bearing in mind that I only do about 500 miles a month. It's an old 1995/6 Astra, 1.6 16V, I checked the oil last night and theres no gloop/mayo as people have described around the oil filler cap so it doesn't look like it's mixing with water or anything else. It's a really odd problem, I googled it before I posted on here and it didn't really return a lot of results. I am just cheapskate and don't want to pay £50 if I can build a rig (maybe with a paperclip) myself. Don't spend money if you don't have to... I've had a look on car forums as well but most of them tend to deal with newer cars and don't seem to have a "chat about your old bangers" discussion forum for slightly older cars! Still, thanks all I'm going to have a look and see what kind of plug I've got... fingers crossed, I can use a paperclip to read it (here's hoping anyway). Although, what do you connect the paperclip up to?

Uh-Oh, that's not how it should work! I've not really fiddled with my settings since I've got here but I certainly will now Thanks for the heads up.

I've not heard anything along those lines. Would there be any reason why?

This definitely does sound dodgy to me.... I'd not want to let any students log in to SIMS unless they had virtually no permissions and even then I wouldn't be particularly happy about that. I can imagine System Manager would get rather clogged up with student's logins as well. Maybe there could be some kind of generic student login issued where student's can add their own comments/grade forecasts to their own record which before being added to the system, are audited by a teacher? Still, I can imagine students writing all kinds of crud on other student's records and that no teacher would want the hassle of dealing with that.

That sounds like absolute insanity to me! Then again, am I correct in assuming that you're only dealing with the school who you work for? that and you're also extremely competent when it comes to Nova! I'd say it's perfectly viable in that situation as you'd know your school's timetable inside out, for me though, where I'm supporting loads of different schools all with completely different timetable structures and not all of the timetablers/data managers necessarily have a clue, I dont have the same level of understanding of each schools timetable so if they're using maintenance datasets - it really does result in quite a headache for me trying to figure it all out!

Hi everyone, There seem to be a few budding mechanics around here so I thought I might as well ask for some advice as I don't really know that much about cars (I just follow the Haynes manual and pray!). After coming off the motorway from doing one of my usual 75 mile journeys this weekend, my car then decided it'd turn on the wonderful orange light of doom, I cursed at my car but still carried on driving and managed to drive all the way home with this light on. It's an odd light (engine electronics light)which simply tells you that "there is a problem somewhere", it doesn't tell you where or give any indication as to what at all. In order to find out what exactly is the problem you've got to read the code from the on board computer. Is there any way that I can somehow make a device myself/connect it up to my laptop which I can hook up to the on board computer which will read the code and tell me what's wrong with it? I'd rather not pay £50 for a garage just to read the code only to tell me that (most likely) it is going to cost loads/is dying. I've been trying to figure out what it is but I'm not really sure, the only symptom which the car has is that it's glugging oil a bit faster than usual, yet there are no oil leaks in sight. A quick backstory of the car (and my dodgy repairs!). It broke down about 6-7months ago with an oil leak, a £2 gasket which caused me a nightmare. I decided to buy a Haynes manual and attempt to fix it myself because it would have cost hundreds, maybe thousands in labour costs, it took me a good 4 weekends working on it solidly - I dismantled virtually half the engine, took the exhaust off, changed the CAM belt and I was absolutely amazed when it actually started up again, let alone moved. Funnily enough, a month later it passed it's MOT without any issues... now I'm wondering if the problem I've encountered has anything to do with my hash mechanics from back then. Edit: I mis-spelt what in the title and can't change it! /slapself

So true, a while back my car had an oil leak that was caused by a paper gasket which had gone after 15years. I replaced it with a nice metal gasket (which cost me about £2) but that wasn't before I had to dismantle half the engine to get to it. I'd not really got a clue what I was doing, I just went to Halfords, bought a Haynes manual, followed that and borrowed half my dad's garage.

I used to work for a company where we had to deal with both strict SLA's, demanding users, profit driven managers who used to stomp around the office flailing their arms, field engineers who had attitude as well as no clue and teachers, kids, SMT along with all I.T personnel. It was absolute hell! As long as you've only got a few of those issues to contend with, you'll be alright, good luck

You can't please everyone. Even if you had the best product/service in the world, someone would moan about it, guaranteed. Just carry on as normal I personally think this site has a wealth of knowledge - after spending ages reading topics, in the end I just had to sign up as I wanted to try and contribute as I'd learnt so much just from reading a few posts here and there.

It definitely sounds like a power supply issue to me. Does the motherboard have any mini LED's which indicate if it is receiving power or not?

I'm actually rather intreguied about TimeTabler now and am I wondering if it would be fairly easy to pick up and use? I understand the principles of Timetabling and how everything works and am competent when it comes to using and supporting Nova T6. Maintenance datasets in my book are usually a big "no! don't go there" as unless you know fully what you're doing (which I've got to say, I don't actually know anyone who does and I'm even a bit confused myself) then they are generally the easiest way to mess up your timetable from my experience. Schools who use this function end up giving me a headache as soon as they say the words Nova and maintenance in the same sentence virtually every time they pick up the phone. Independent Schools do have slightly different requirements when it comes to creating a timetable, however I note on Keith's website for Timetabler that many Independent Schools all across the world have used it already, one of the most recent comments is from King Henry VIII school in Coventry (another Independent with secondary + college age students) - it may be worth trying to have a chat with the timetabler there.

Yeah, I remember being told a while ago (I'm not sure by who) that it's completely random as well.

I'm contemplating upgrading my home PC. I really do like the look of one of these 6 Cores, all running at 3.2ghz with 9MB of cache for £235, sounds like the best buy out there at the moment to me. The motherboards that are designed for it also have USB 3.0 support, stick some nice DDR3 1800Mhz RAM in there along with my current graphics card (9800GTX+) and I'll be well away. I might wait a few months first for the price of it to come down a bit though.

Most schools which I've dealt with use data collection sheets, however there is one school that I know of which use an online data collection sheet.

I'm not sure how you'll get confidence from a one week intensive course... in actual fact, it sounds like it must be quite a stressful course as you've got so much to cram in rather than just sitting back and learning from any mistakes you made throughout the week. I'll give another vote for private practice as well. It sounds like you can drive fairly well so I'd go for it, what my parents did was, when I had got to the stage of "I'm ok at driving" I then got insured on their big old estate, it was a huge car! but as they said to me "if you can drive this and park it, you can drive anything else without any issues". Get a friend or an actual driving instructor with a big car and go for it!

Will you be running anything other than SIMS on that server? It does seem like overkill to me... still, if you do buy it, you won't have to worry about upgrading your SIMS server for a very, very long time.

Unlinked contacts are generally a pain as contacts can be linked into numerous areas of SIMS.net. When you view a contact's details, the associated student's panel only shows student's they are associated to, it doesn't show if they are associated to any applicants or in the system as a next of kin for a member of staff. If the contact is linked to anyone in these areas, it will stop them from appearing in the Delete Unlinked Contacts routine. There are numerous patches available from Capita (which I've not yet applied to any school's databases so I'm not 100% sure what they all do exactly). It starts off with KB95547... Apparently "The patch updates Tools | Housekeeping | Delete Unlinked Contacts so that it can delete ANYONE with no remaining purpose in SIMS". Does that mean we can delete anyone? Or just contacts who are already unlinked? It's probably worth logging a case with the Capita helpdesk about this one.

Sounds awful, I'm glad I've never had any problems like that... so far.... I only ever get those annoying phone calls from them where they keep asking "do you want to upgrade? it's only £expensive" x10. Which I have to say, I am getting rather fed up with.

Get some colour in there! I don't see why people are so obsessed with dull colours... brown, grey, black, navy, awful dark green, argh! I'd like to see some bright blue sandals with zingy yellow/green socks..

Sounds like it might be bit of a case where the right hand doesn't quite know what the left hand is doing? Personally though, I usually try and upgrade most schools by using SOLUS, if that doesn't work then I'll probably copy the Setups folder across.

If you're truly not happy where you are and think you'll be happier closer to wherever your home is then go for it, just beware that it will cost you. Surely though... the value of the house can't have fluctuated that much in 3 months?

That used to happen quite frequently to one of my family members. Eventually... on the 20th time, someone finally told them why... apparently driving a very clean (on the outside) Vauxhall Vectra with loads of maps on the back seat, being over 50 and wearing a suit means that you'll probably fit the profile for being either a terrorist or a drug dealer. As soon as they got rid of the car though, they've not been stopped since... it's very odd.

That speed camera system sounds really dodgy to me, I'll have to get an automatic number plate swapping system installed as well as some inconspicious colour changing chameleon style paint. I just don't really like being tracked, I've got nothing to hide but I feel that the amount of times I'm caught on CCTV whether in my car, in a shop, on the train, pretty much everywhere is getting to be a bit ridiculous, there's one road I drive down round here and it's got about 15 cameras for recording various things in the space of a mile - this is too much! It could have it's uses but it would only really catch speeding offenses, not all of which would be justified anyway. It probably wouldn't have much effect on dangerous driving as a whole as not all dangerous driving offenses are always related to speed, a lot of the time it's just pure idiocy. Tailgating, for example virtually never gets caught by "the law", niether does dangerously overtaking around a blind corner and as such, I'm not sure why so much emphasis is placed on speed. It would stop the whole "break for the speed camera and then speed up again" issue which about 99% of people I know engage in but that's about it. In regard to regular speed camera's being a cash cow, I do believe that they are. Some may have been strategically positioned in order to attempt to prevent accidents, however, surely if they were just supposed to deter drivers... we'd just get the 3 (or 6 if you're a new driver) points on our licenses... rather than the £80 fine which also goes with it. That means it's 4 speeding offenses and your license is gone... not really a lot when you consider how much some people drive. On a side note, I've never been caught speeding as it's not something I generally tend to do. I usually try and err on the side of caution as it's better to be safe than sorry.

I upgraded my OS recently and in the end I went for Windows 7. Firstly, it's easy to use and it looks nice on bigger monitors, virtually all software I'd tried when I was using the RC build of it worked without any issues. I do like using Linux as well... I've got a few VM's floating around with various flavours installed but being a gamer, I find that trying to get a fair few games to run on Linux can often be like trying to push a 2ft wide sofa through a 1ft wide door.