ToyHeartsFan

Thanks for the tip these projectors have been driving the teachers nuts!

Casio are not the first to offer filterless, LED aren't bright enough yet for large venues and I dont know how well they will stay the distance but hopefully they are a step in the right direction. I think the last batch of Sanyos we had came with educational warranty on the lamp but it was meaningless when you read the small print which specified a maximum number of hours per week the projector could be used (it was less than a normal school week). Other manufacturers have bundled spare bulbs with projectors at point of sale which is a better idea but you still need someone to fit them. Lamp prices have improved a lot but take our old Sanyo PLC-SE10, it's not had a lot of use and the image is still good but it only supports 800*600, its well out of warranty and will need a new lamp in a couple of months which will cost closer to £200 than £100. When you need to spend that much on a lamp its a big chunk of money that could go towards a new projector that comes with a 20,000 hour warranty on the LED source. I'm not trying to champion the casio LED projectors because until we have had them a few years I dont know how well they will cope in a school environment they could turn out to be worse than the Sanyos but for us it made sense to give them a go because I needed something brighter and with lower maintenance costs than what we were using. Two of our three Sanyo PLC XP51 hall projectors have failed (well out of warranty but not had enough use to require a lamp change) They were also costing us a grand a year to have the filters cleaned (scaffold job) and the company that was doing it have gone bump and other companies have either said no they are too high or yes but they didnt have their own scaffold so would need an extra £150 per visit. Of the last 4 normal projectors (sanyo plc xu301 - still under warranty) we had two of them keep cutting out with power failure events and TPMatrix said they couldnt find anything wrong with the one we returned and another generates interferance on the passthrough VGA port if the projector isnt switched on so the teacher has to leave the projector on after the kids have left if she still needs to use the PC. So when I needed to replace some end of life class room projectors it was time for a change and I gave Sanyo the boot; we now have 4 soon to be 5 Casio XJ-M150-UJ-EDU projectors and I was able to modify the mount to account for the lens position being different saving us a grand on installation.

I think I understand what you mean... Amps are designed to have an input within a certain voltage range (line in) and the voltage from the headphone output on computers can be too high which causes clipping. If the PC is saturating the amp input and causing clipping simply turning the volume on the PC down to the mid point should fix it. Turn the volume on the PC down low and the amp up high, slowly turn the volume on the PC up until the clipping starts and use a point just below this; Leave the PC at this setting and use the the control on the amp to adjust the volume to the desired level.

Some high end projectors for halls such as "Sanyo PLC-ZM5000L Professional Projector" have these type of systems built into them "Auto Maintenance Filter System enables the projector to operate for up to 10,000 hours without filter maintenance" I have no idea how good they are or if they really work and I don't think they are available on smaller class room spec projectors. The reason people are starting to use LED projectors is because the casio ones are filterless thus removing part of the problem. We now have several of them but I've never opened one up and we havent had them long so I don't know how well the optics are sealed, they might well suffer from similar problems with dust build up in the optics over time. When you take into account the cost of the lamps there was very little difference in price between the sanyos we were using and the casios and we have had problems with a number of Sanyo projectors failing (not because of dust) so it was a no brainer to try something else. Ontop of that you need to bear in mind that not all schools have full time ICT staff and smaller schools will often only have one person looking after the ICT equipment so if they have to use external support it can be costing them £400 a day which is money that can be spent on better things than cleaning filters and changing lamps. With such high maintenance costs its not surprising that people are looking for alternatives, its possible that in a few years time everyone will be moaning about their casio LED projectors and looking for somthing else but at the moment they are the only alternative to standard projectors.

Well our Sanyo projector just came back from warranty repair and the screws that hold the lamp in place hadnt been screwed into place, well done TPMatrix your engineers really fill me with confidence. And you want me to pay £100 to clean our projector which is an hours work? Oh and the new warranty void if opened sticker incase we have it cleaned by someone other than TPMatrix is a real nice addition.

Also if its not the default intranet page on that server it will need a different port specified i.e. http://servname: port

I don’t clean the filters as often as I should but I do try and get around a few times a year otherwise they will clog up and the projectors will overheat and cut out. It depends how dusty the environment is and how much use they get used, most of ours are on all day. Dragging ladders all around school is a pain and can only be done after school, the worst ones are the ones with the universal mounts that block the filter so to do them properly you have to take them down. On some when you take the filter out the dust drops inside the projector so you can’t win. I clean them when I need to change the lamp or if the image is poor using an omega VAC (antistatic, the sort of thing printer / copier engineers use) and an electric duster that blows air out rather than a compressor or the cans. You can get most of the dust out this way opening the optical path without taking the lenses out or touching the mirrors / prism. I’ve just sent a sanyo back that was cutting out and the only way to restart it / clear the warning light was to pull the power cable out (power failure shown in the event log) they couldn’t find anything wrong with it and wanted a small fortune to clean it (we hadn’t done it yet because its still under warranty). They finally agreed to replace the fans but I’m not convinced it will make any difference. We are now starting to use Casio bulb and filter less projectors because I’ve had enough of Sanyo only time will tell how well they last. We also need to replace our hall projectors 2 of them have failed and it was costing us a grand a year to have the filters cleaned, they are 6 meters high so who ever does it needs scaffolding…

Its been years since I setup our wsus server but a few things you can explore: I would check that your workstations all have different SID's if you have imaged them. Check your firewall. Try running these on a workstation: Try this 1st Update now: wuauclt.exe /detectnow only try this if above doesnt work Update now / reset authorization: wuauclt.exe /updatenow /resetauthorization I think once I had to update online from windowsupdate before it would talk to the wsus server because the windows updater on the workstation was out of date.

Reminds me of when I had an RM Server replaced at another school the RM tech was quite insistant that more than 20GB for C:\ would impact on performance, thanks but i would rather my server still worked when MS release their next SP / batch of security updates; I cant remember what size I opted for but it was 50-100% more than they wanted to use. If its a small school you should be ok but doing it this way for us would be a nightmare - 3 form entry primary so over 700 kids + all the staff and loads of software it would take weeks to reinstall everything again. If your server is that new any chance its got an Esata port? that would be the fastest way of transfering data or you could drop in an ESata / USB3 card if its got a free slot on the mobo. USB2 will do but you will max out the transfer rate of the port so wont get max performance from an external hdd.

Have I read this correctly, you are just installing a new OS on the existing server you aren’t adding a new server? You’re intending to wipe the OS and start again setting up dhcp / AD etc from scratch, reinstalling all of the software and rejoining the workstations to the new domain? I think most people would add a new server as a second DC and demote the old one after all the services / data had been moved. Just an idea! But could you leave the data on the D:\ drive where it is and just setup shares / permissions again after the new OS is installed? Any software you have on the server would also need reinstalling because you would loose all the registry entries and any services they installed would be missing. You still need an onsite (tested backup) because if it goes wrong it will take forever to download all that data from your offsite backup (that’s assuming that the offsite backup isn’t just a selective backup i.e. your MIS data). You should be able to restore the data on D: ok but by config do you mean shares, permissions and services? Those are part of the system state and I’m not sure of the implications of trying to restore the system state from a 2008 business server onto a 2008 R2 server. I thinks it’s far more complicated than you think especially as it’s your only server and probably hosts your MIS database. If they have support from their LEA etc then I would give them a ring before you jump into the deep end as it could go horribly wrong.

We have 30+ of them and the only time they dont work is when they break the pen or forget to switch the board on. Over the years I've had to replace a couple of power supplies, a serial cable and a couple of controllers got replaced under warranty but on the whole they have been very reliable. They are great bits of kit and with the limited money we have to spend on ICT it would really bug me if they were sat there not being used when we could of spent the money on something else.

V4 is quite old now so it might be worth you updating the driver we are using v5.7.22.1 (modified so serial still works when we deploy it via AD) with activinspire v1.6.44682. One thing that has caused us problems in the past is USB extensions, they are best avoided if possible.

I've never had a problem with a promethean driver other than when they stopped installing the serial part by default. There is a simple change you need to make to the msi when deploying it via AD to get the older serial boards working other than that I've never had a problem.

^This Have your staff had training on the software? We had a teacher with us for a short time that knew the software inside out and that gave the other teachers the push they needed to make better use of the boards creating interactive flip charts etc rather than using them as glorified black boards. Also I would suggest that having more than one type of board is a bad idea as the software is incompatible.

Health and safety: Children shouldnt be in any room unsupervised what if one had a fit / was electocuted etc... and wasnt found until an hour later? E-Safety: In Primary its a big no no. I've worked in secondary as well and being older they should be more aware of the dangers but they are also much more likely to deliberately look for things they shouldn't. I once found a girl putting her mobile number on a public chat board that she had found (it wasnt being blocked by the filtering) and she couldnt care less / didnt understand what the problem was at all with what she had done... You can only point out the problem to your head unfortunately at the end of the day some schools dont see the problem. If you have policy central or some such monitoring in place it can mitigate the Esafety problems up to a point but at the end of the day there should be an appropriate adult in the room that is responsible for them.

A few thoughts: A rack designed for switches isn’t designed with the cooling necessary for servers / UPS’s. I believe server racks are also deeper than most switch racks. Your server should be in a temperature controlled (ideally air-conditioned) environment which is also secure (data protection) from burglars / visitors / children / teachers. If a server will actually fit in your switch rack it will probably cook in a very short time unless the cab has been specifically designed for that purpose. Build it yourself? Be very careful it means you / the school has no support if something breaks, also who is going to support it if you leave? I would seriously consider involving any external ICT providers the school uses / the LEA ICT people and getting a prebuilt unit from the likes of HP / Dell etc… Server 1 – scrap Server 2 – make it a member server; use it to host WSUS, machine images, school intranet page, print server etc… i.e. any none critical roles that will take some of the load of your new server. Raid – Essential, I know entry level servers are being shipped with cheap 0+1 controllers but all the servers we have are raid 5 with a spare hot swap drive in them. Backup – don’t even think about relying on raid as a means of protecting your data, raid adds some redundancy nothing else. What happens if: 2 drives fail at the same time, the raid controller fails, a teacher deletes the contents of a common drive, the array becomes corrupted or the server bursts into flames? Do you want to tell your users that they have just lost 5 years work? I would get a few quotes and tell them they need to up the budget, the LTO backup drive I have in our DC cost about the same as you’re spending on your entire server.

We have a lot of older kit and are still stuck on XP but I had discounted ssd's until we move to W7 because of the trim thing. Have you actually deployed ssd's in xp machines or was this just a short test as it might be another option for us to consider?

We only have a couple of 54g standalone access points in key places and this did look intresting but I noticed the lack of a gigabit NIC as well. When I looked at it I did find a post somewhere (on their forum) saying that using 100mb wont cause a bottle neck because of various reasons, they said something along the lines of: 100mb lan is full duplex i.e 100mb in both directions - wireless isnt the overheads in the access point (encryption etc) mean you will never get 300mbps anyway sorry i cant remember what else they said off the top of my head I'm not convinced myself but 300mbs is the theortical limit and without an N class access point that has a gigabit NIC I dont know how much data I could pull before saturating it in real world tests. There are a lot of different options available now using competing tech and its getting quite confusing comparing them. I like the look of the one that puts all the access points on a single channel and you just keep adding more as needed which gets around the problem of overlapping channels interfering with each other but then again the price of this system is so low we could probably get basic coverage for our main building for less than it would cost to buy a management unit for the other solutions.

We use redirected desktop / start menus so the shortcuts are all shared from the server. another way if using local profiles would be to write a logon script that copys the shotcut to the approriate location on the workstations another option would be to create an msi containing only the shortcut and deploy it using active directory as a last resort you could copy the shortcut to a mapped drive they all have access to

I dont think it will be that simple! If you wanted to shutdown 2 microsoft servers or a couple of microsoft workstations it would be easy enough using the OS tools or a third party application but I don't think your NAS will support these and I don't know what OS your controller PC is running. "help shutdown" @ the cmd prompt on a 2003 server will give you the command line options there are plenty of third party programs that do the same thing we use a old verion of remoteshutdown.exe to shutdown some of our PCs at the end of the day. The problem is these are designed for systems running a microsoft OS and your NAS wouldn't respond. Your NAS manufacturer might have a third party application or a way of shutting it down remotely that you could somehow script from a microsoft server but I think this would be specific to your NAS. You can add a module to some APC UPS that can expand the number of serial / usb ports so you can shutdown multiple servers but it would cost more than a new UPS would and the entry level UPS's you are using might not be supported. You might need to just bite the bullet and get a couple more UPS's (I'm assuming your nas has built in UPS support).

I get a pot of money and have to stretch it as far as I can which means its not really possible to have a planned replacement programme Although I have a very good idea what my priorities will be for the year things can change and I have to spend it in a way that will have the best impact on the childrens education. The last couple of years its been replacing the main PC in class rooms with core2duos, this year the bulk has gone on upgrading the storage in our aging server (the cost of 6 ultra 320 sca2 300GB drives is enough to make anyone cringe) and replacing some of our projectors which were end of life and a lot of new lamps for our other projectors. Our ICT Suite needs replacing / upgrading, we need to move from xp (I'd be happy to stick with it if microsoft weren't killing it off and withdrawing support), we need to upgrade from office 2003, we need to upgrade the servers to 2008, we need... well you get the idea Unless bob the builder comes in and cuts through a cable you shouldnt really need to replace network cabling as long as you've got cat 5e. If you have got cabling problems then more than likely it wasnt installed very well e.g. they used solid core cable and decided to bend it @ 90 degrees a few times when installing it. Unless you mean the kids are damaging the network sockets then thats a different ball game.

I don’t know a lot about switches but most of the posts seem off topic unless all of your switches are kaput. Even if your core switch died the workstations should still connect at gigabit speeds to the edge switch they are plugged into. I remember when schools couldn’t even afford to connect the server at gigabit and were lucky if they had 10 / 100 switches and weren’t using 10 /100 hubs let alone being able to connect the workstations at gigabit speeds. The workstations didn’t suddenly drop down to 10mb link speed because the load on the switch / backbone was too great. Yes you might have bottle necks in your network and unless you have no other choice daisy chaining switches is a bad idea but none of this should cause your problem. What I would be looking at: 1. The driver on your workstations 2. Power management on your WORKSTATIONS (power management can drop the link speed) 3. Faulty Cabling / patch leads 4. The way your switches are configured (have you checked for firmware updates?) Even if one or two of your switches are faulty (I’m not convinced that any of them are) they should only cause problems to the equipment connected directly to it not your whole network. Got a few spare PCI gigabit nics? If yes drop them in a few workstations and see how they behave. Got a cheap (£30) 8 port unmanaged gigabit desktop switch? Then drop it between one of the switches and a few of your workstations and see what happens. If you have the money by all means replace your entire infrastructure. But I find it hard to believe that all of your switches all faulty, unless you have been flooded or have cooked them.

Can you nick the wireless cards out of all your Tecras and use them as a short term fix or do you need both sets of laptops connecting wirelessly? I think Intel know they have a problem or they wouldnt be saying this on the link I posted! "If the slider is already at Highest / Maximum Performance, move the slider to another setting and then back to Highest / Maximum Performance."

+1 for photocopiers (even better is that it doesnt come out of my ICT budget) We still have lasers dotted around a mix of HP and Samsung. I've found the price per page often relates to the cost of the printer i.e. a cheap hp 2600n (we have several and they are ok for us but I wont recommend them because they can be problematic for some people) only has low capacity toner drums (2k) but our ancient 4600n has large capacity drums which cost a fortune but the per page cost is lower.

That's bad - the only reason I got the email was because the School Business Manager sent me a copy (she gets all the enquiry mail) If they do restore the deleted accounts like they have said they will then I'll stick with Zimbra for this financial year but in the mean time I'm going to be looking at the alternatives with our ICT Coordinator. Schools do need to delete old accounts but we were already doing this at the end of every school year and link2icts approach this time was too heavy handed. Most of the time link2ict are quite helpful and one of my former colleagues actually works for them but I think they got it wrong this time.