Gaz

My thinking is that because I'd need 18 of these that £35 each is cheaper than £105 each (intel 180GB) I Guess a full blown SSD would be a better way to go but its justifying it to management. :-(

Desktop machines used for CAD/CAM

I've never tried searching for our channel but can you access it by typing the address in the address bar? What I've done is add a favourite in Internet Explorer (Via Group Policy) to the channel so its easy for them to get to.

Has anyone used one of those SSD's that are designed to act like a cache drive. I'm just wondering if its a good idea in an educational environment. We have just taken delivery of some new workstations but desipte my request for SSD's they came with Western Digital Blue drives. These were purchased for us so we can't send them back in protest, I'm just happy to have some new kit. Anyway back to my original question, is it a good idea to use a cache SSD and a mechanical drive in an edu environment?

There are plenty of threads on this forum. What web filter do you have? For smoothwall http://www.edugeek.net/forums/smoothwall-direct-support/93751-youtube-schools-faq.html General thread. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/87277-youtube-schools-launched.html If they go to youtube.com they are automatically redirected to youtube.com/edu If they try and play a video thats not on youtube.com/edu it will just give them an error saying they need to contact the sys admin to allow access.

I'd put money on it being the page file too. Its easy to check, just enable hidden system files and folder and check in the root of C:\ With so much ram you could probably reduce the size of the page file unless you are likely to exceed 32gB's of ram.

Nothing! buy the software version of Smoothwall, save yourself £1800(expedited price included) and stick it on an old server or a fast PC with a decent network card in it. You could build a decent system to run it on for about £500 for 50 users.

What type of switch was it? Was it an external power supply? I doubt they would be capable of fixing any aspect of the switch, I'd contact the manufacturer about that.

Just spoke with someone using one of those livechat things that pop up but I always close, decided to use it and got chatting to a nice chap who convinced me to go for a refurb unit. Even going to sort a UK power cable out as its an EU unit.

Do you have any filtering software that logs their sites visited? That would have been my first port of call. That looks like a nice application that AngryTechnician posted though, I might give that a try, even though we have Impero and Smoothwall that log sites visited.

Cheers for the reply Willott, doubt I'd get edu pricing as I actually want this for a home project. I'd prefer to go for a new item and the difference isn't that great, its about £15

I've seen a Cisco switch I want on hardware.com but as I've never ordered from them before I wondered how reputable the site was. Has anyone used them? Any horror stories? Cheers.

Is youtube not a viabile option? At least you will have some control over it with youtube for schools.

Yeah, I'll need to update it though as I've not played it in quite a while. I'm going out after work for tea but hopefully if everyone is still around I'll join the TS server and see who is still about depending what time I get back.

I don't often read YouTube comments but this one was particularly funny.

DRM is dying out and where it still exists systems like Steam make it easier. Battlefield Bad Company 2 for example had 5 activation limit (you could have it on 5 computers) on the Disk version but on Steam it had unlimted because it was managed on steam. Apple stripped DRM out of their MP3s on i-tunes because it was just counter productive. Anyone seen E3 this year? Sony (massive on the DRM front) have been effectivly tbagging Microsoft with regards to their lack of restrictions on what gamers can do and DRM in their products. lulz

Yeah I'd be up for that. I've not played it in a while but when I do its always chaotic fun.

You don't OWN games, what you have is a licence to play that game and you just happen to have the media on DVD. I've just got mine on steam. If I wanted to I could aquire the game disk and then use my genuine CD key to then play the game. Anyway lets get back to topic. Looking at peoples steam profiles and the games they have there aren't many that we all have in common that can be played on mass.

I guess it depends on how many people turn up. Games like left4dead are only good for 4 people max. Highly unlikely to happen with Steam/Valve being the biggest games content delivery network. Besides you get keys with the games you buy and they would be compatable with other systems, boxed copies will eventually fade out like CD's and CDNs are the future. Plus the CD keys from your boxed game will work in steam.

I cant wait! I like watching the LOTR extended trilogy back to back when I've got man flu. It will be epic when the rest of the Hobbit is released.

If we were to state a time and day what game would be the best for everyone?

That ZyXEL would be considered a low end to mid switch but it depends how big your network is and the setup and what may happen in the future. Hard to beat the price I suppose but remember its driving your infrastructure.

Hehe, yeah chatting is part of the social aspect of gaming too! I do have a Teamspeak3 server we can use if needed.

Has the steam group actually played any games together yet? Maybe we should organise a gaming night sometime, depending on what games everyones got I suppose. My profile: Steam Community :: ID :: Mad1

I've run into this problem and It may have something to do with the way the website is setup. A real world example. www.runshaw.ac.uk works runshaw.ac.uk doesn't Some info here. dns - Why can't some websites be shown without the "www" in the URL? - Server Fault