Mulvaney

Hi everyone. I'm trying to help a member of my family who is clearly quite careless fix their laptop (again). First the mouse pad died, then the three USB ports went (one by one), then the first PCMCIA USB card died, now the PCMCIA socket seems to be dead. All that's left is 4 pin 1394 firewire. Is there any way of plugging a mouse in to that socket? I don't know if it's possible to convert firewire to USB for that purpose. It doesn't look like it from what I've read so far. He's not a techie, so I think he'd go mad trying to replace the mouse with the numeric keyboard on the laptop, which also shares some of the letter keys, so he'd have to switch between typing and mousing. There's a touchpad app for the iPhone, which would work at home on his wifi, but it would be fiddly to use instead of a laptop touchpad. There's no bluetooth built in, only WIFI. There's a network port, but I wouldn't imagine that you can get a mouse for that. Other than that there's only VGA, S-Video, a modem port and an internal IDE CDROM connector (I've got an IDE to SATA tray in mine, so that I can use an SSD for the boot drive and a 1TB SATA for the data drive, instead of a CDROM.) A shame to waste a perfectly good laptop because he can't use a mouse on it... perhaps I'll put a non-mouse O/S on it when he finally gives up on it and buys a new laptop (which he'll probably break).

It seems to be available to pre-order. Apparently they're making it available for free to all secondary schools. Not sure when though... I can't wait to see it!

Up to the point when we had about 300 machines (the first 7 years), there was just me. Then we got another tech with responsibility for the admin network. A year later another tech for looking after laptops. A couple of years later another tech for doing the basic stuff and a "guru" / manager. So there were 5 of us, looking after: 500 PCs 100 staff laptops 100 student laptops 70 interactive whiteboards 30 printers 10 servers 100 staff 1300 students 2 sites wireless over both sites (two different types) setups for assemblies and events a training room with video cameras and mics. Then the "guru" / manager left and didn't get replaced (the admin tech was given more money to become the manager). Now the admin tech's leaving and it doesn't look like they'll replace him. So we'll be down to 3 staff with the same amount of kit / people to look after. The job descriptions are so vague that they'll probably try to get us to do the admin tech's job as well as our own - not that there are enough hours in the day to do that. I've seen two guys with less experience and less technical ability take the manager's role, so it's probably time to go for it myself!