Trapper

I use an Acorn RISC PC PS2 keyboard on my service desk. Circa 1994. I've also got a BBC B 5.5" floppy disc of Repton, but it's stuck onto my wall

I've found that OEM product keys for Windows never activate, regardless of the media. I've taken an XP Home Retail CD, changed the PID, reburnt and refused to take the product key. A lot of OEMs pre-activate their copies, and the product keys supplied with the laptop are not valid for activation. This is especially true for Vista Home editions. Your best hope is to get hold of the system restore disc for you make/model. This can be expensive, Toshiba have quoted me £20 in the past. If you have contacts at retail outlets however, it can be useful. I got hold of system restore CD for a Patriot laptop(PC World re badged Advent), from a guy I know who works there. Otherwise the only way to get hold of it, would have been to pay the PC World TechGuys to do it for me!

Adobe Premiere will also do this, and it's useful when you're working with large .wmvs. It can take several hours though.

Have tried OpenDNS, frankly it didn't make a huge amount of difference

Their DNS are playing up something awful at the moment. I can download at 1.8MBps, but browsing feels like dial up!

Cheers folks. I've sent LCWS an email.

A great site for backgrounds: InterfaceLIFT

Hi, I was wondering if anyone in the Birmingham area knows of any companies who can safely, and reliably dispose of old IT kit - printers, scanners, CRT monitors, assorted odds and ends. Preferably for free, or a very small fee! Cheers

Are you multicasting them all at once, or unicasting each machine separately?

I think they will thrive, but perhaps become more a Media Centre PC. Gaming, multimedia, internet in one box. I've never been a fan of consoles, I find the controllers to insensitive compared to a keyboard and mouse. PCs are still IMHO the best gaming platforms for control and graphics.

Most definitely go down the XBMC route. I stream music, video, podcasts from my desktop machine. You can also find emulators for the popular old consoles as well. Grab an Xbox DVD Remote (£5 second hand from Amazon) for easy control. I paid £50 for mine from Game two years ago. It came pre-chipped with a wireless remote. I've barely used it as a console, as I'm not a fan, however as a Media Centre it's fantastic. There's also a BBC iPlayer script for it now, which downloads the iPod format videos to your Xbox and lets you watch them on a big screen.

Should be by default. I'll also check that one on Monday. This fault has only appeared in the last couple of weeks, and no changes have been made to the clients, printer, server or Ranger Print Management system.

I've had this issue after downloading the integrated XP with SP3 ISO from Technet and swapping the i386/setupp.ini with a volume license one in PowerISO. It did ask for VLK, but would not accept ours. It also would not install without a product key, which I believe was one of the features Microsoft was touting about an integrated SP3 install. Frankly with some rather nasty bugs starting to come out of the woodwork, it might be worth waiting for a while, and continuing with Windows Updates to SP2.

What is your laptop make. With some of our HPs we've had to disable SATA Native Mode in the BIOS, before Windows install would recognise the HDD.

webman I also moved away from f2s. Far too many take overs, and their customer support which used to be spot on (no queues, spoke to technical competent person) was eroded away. I was offered an uncapped service if I stayed, however I routinely went way over my 50GB pcm limit and they never complained. I believe they haven't actually taken any subscriber to book over that problem. That may change in the future though.

Hmm thanks for the replies guys. I've checked both server and printer side and the paper is set for A4. I'll check the continue on error setting on Monday.

Can't you still use Ranger up to the number of clients you have already purchased?

I haven't actually heard anything from Quidco, and I signed up several months ago

Hello All, We having a problem with a HP 2550n Colour Laser printer. We can print to it, however the green "Continue" button has to be pressed between pages, otherwise the printer will stall between pages. The imaging drum and carts are all fine, and have been replaced recently. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as the students are getting a bit trigger happy with the green button, and printing dozens of test pages off! Cheers

I've been with them for a few months, fantastic service. I get 17Mbps down, and 1.5Mbps up. No caps, no traffic shaping. £18UKP pcm.

Originally from South Derbyshire, but now working in South Birmingham.

Many, many Virtual Servers. No longer have a "real" one, as it cost far too much in electricity to justify running one 24/7 to host a basic web/file/print server!

Just as a side note YouTube Downloader is a fantastic piece of software for creating small WMV video files. It can also take a video and convert it to MP3 audio. Very useful when some students need a music video they've found on YouTube in an audio format for a piece of expressive arts coursework. Very small and compact piece of software, and tends to be a fair bit quicker than Movie Maker.

Frankly I think Vista is a great home/home office operating system. If you have a decent rig with plenty of RAM and decent graphics hardware. For standard business machines the performance is noticeably worse than XP. For that reason alone I doubt it will take off in the business world, let alone education where we can't replace entire suites with top spec machines at the drop of a hat. With XP Service Pack 3, extended support and the next version out by 2010 I think a lot of organisations will plan to leap frog Vista. It is in my opinion not the new Windows ME as many commentators have said. It is a stable, rock solid OS, with the UI brought into line with Mac OS X. It just requires a big leap in hardware, perhaps more than Microsoft anticipated!

I have run it with a HP DC5750 with 1GB of shared RAM and an AMD Dual Core at 2.20GHz, however even with the fancy Aero effects turned off, it is very sluggish compared to XP. CMIS would occasionally decide to completely fail to load as well!