wooksey

Yep, we're upgrading our existing machines so we could be eligible for the scrappage scheme- that's if we go with RM of course! Thanks for the heads up

Thanks for the advice! Did you use the Dell website for your quotes at first? So far, we've received a number of quotes (RM, Stone, CBC) and I'm not sure whether they think we're idiots or they're just trying to sell what they've got left in their warehouse after a bad year of sales! The spec of the machines just astounds £599 per laptop, the spec of which is half that (2GB>4GB RAM, 160GB>320GB hard drive) to the next model up from an online store which costs £379! That equates to a difference of almost four thousand pound- did you find this too?!!?

Thanks for all the advice! I followed the steps from the Apple advice sites but still had no joy. I tried emailing netsweeper directly and after an email the next day saying that they were looking into the problem for me I received another email today saying that my support call was now closed! Fortunately, I managed to get through to the right person at the LA (after phoning since February!!), during half term who monitored the URLs that iTunes was trying to access and then created rules on the filter that would let it work. Thanks again for the suggestions

Thanks for all the advice! As for RM, it's sad, but I imagine we're certainly not the only school in this situation, that only has a LA technician visit fortnightly for half a day which means that I have to pick up the pieces in the mean time. As I'm teaching full-time it's pretty much impossible to do this and because RM offer an out-of-the box solution that being used so widely, they are the first people many schools go to. I have gone by the prices on the website so far, but have spoken to one of RM's account managers about how the prices need to come down. Viglen and Stone are coming in to see what they can offer us next week. We're going to be buying some laptops/netbooks too, is it worth buying them through the same company or going somewhere else maybe that have got on offer on- like dabs or ebuyer for example? Cheers

We bought an iMac back in February, to use with a load of ipod touches. However, we haven't been able to connect to the iTunes store from the Mac in school. I tried taking it home and connected without a problem but when it got back to school the sign-in process just timed out as usual. I spoke to Apple it and they said that it must be a problem with the filtering system that we use at school. But....I can connect to the iTunes store using my windows laptop, without a problem. I gave our LA technicians a call and they said that it must be a problem with the iMac, if my windows laptop was working without a problem. I told them about using the iMac at home and they went pretty quiet. We use netsweeper and I've added some addresses for the iTunes store that I found from apple's support site, but it's still not working. I should also say that we also have problems accessing other sites when a login is required- like our VLE! Has anyone got any experience of using macs with netsweeper?? Any advice would great!

I work in a fairly small primary school that and we're looking to upgrade our entire network (at the moment of about 30 machines). ICT's been neglected for years and the existing infracstructure has been maintained by a technician who let's just say hasn't done it a lot of good. Anyway, we're in the process of looking at upgrade options. We currently use CC3 and are looking to go to CC4. However, the SLT have taken RM as the natural company to source the hardware from too, but I think the specs of the machines v their cost just don't add up. Does anyone have experience of upgrading to a CC4 network without using RM hardware? Any suggestions for where we could source our hardware would be greet too! Cheers